WELL SERVICING & DRILLING COMPANY SAVES $1.4 MILLION WITH CARE RELIABILITY SERVICES

PROBLEM

Our client — a Calgary-based well servicing and drilling company — operates close to 200 drilling and service rigs, which are often found in some of the world’s harshest environments.

Facing several internal challenges, our client’s maintenance practices were fragmented as a result of high staff turnover. In addition, the company was providing inconsistent oil and fluid samples and experiencing unpredictable sample turnaround time. Such challenges were causing the company to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in both planned and unplanned downtime, failed equipment and misallocated manpower.

In addition, our client’s inefficient management of its maintenance program meant non-standardized record keeping — often times, there was no record of completed equipment maintenance, including what was done, when and to which unit.

Fluid Life was brought on board to provide oil analysis services for our client. The company sought our help to improve equipment reliability, reduce maintenance costs and increase compliance to a uniform maintenance and reliability program.

SOLUTION

Over the past five years, Fluid Life’s Reliability Services team has worked closely with our client to support its ongoing improvements to reliability initiatives. Using tried and tested reliability improvement methods as part of our signature CARE™ (Condition Assessment & Reliability Evaluation) program, Fluid Life successfully implemented a number of sustainable solutions to help put our client back in control of its oil analysis program. These include:

• Performing ongoing asset condition assessments, including a full audit of existing oil analysis processes.
• Implementing a decision support and corrective actions management process (delivered via our mylab™ web application) to help standardize data integrity, testing defaults, flagging rules, reporting options and financial tracking procedures.
• Taking part in regular meetings with our client to ensure program metrics, performance measures and further opportunities for improvement are discussed and understood.

The merging of Fluid Life’s CARE program components with the talents of our highly skilled lab and academic personnel allowed us to successfully help our client improve its oil analysis processes while also delivering a significant return on investment.

RETURN

Working closely alongside our client, we have helped the company to achieve a number of key improvements to address many of the internal challenges that were putting pressure on its oil analysis and maintenance program. This includes more effective communication across the board, as well as higher levels of employee engagement.

In addition, by helping our client reduce its focus on non-critical issues, its employees now feel less overwhelmed by the amount of corrective actions required and, as a result, are able to better perform in their roles. Most importantly, by introducing more effective record keeping procedures, our client now has a consistent database that allows for the proper tracking of maintenance activities, helping to reduce the amount of unscheduled downtime.

Over the life of the program, Fluid Life estimates that our client has saved approximately $1.4 million, which represents a return on investment of 569%.