Emerging Wireless Technology: Automating the Field Ticket
Authors: St. Clair J. 
Published: March 2010

Introduction

Mobile solutions are literally transforming the way oil and gas companies conduct business today. To succeed and thrive in this aggressive market, it is mission critical for companies to mobilize their workforce by ensuring business data is quickly and securely transferred between the field and the office. With technology playing a crucial part in servicing this mobility need, companies must acquire automation, simplify their processes and adapt their workforce to meet growth requirements and ever-changing challenges.

As oil and gas services companies evaluate ways to become more efficient, many are finding that their field ticketing process is still largely a manual one. Therefore, only a small percentage of their operational data is being captured, meaning a significant amount of data continues to be unaccounted for, causing errors and interruptions in business operations.

The manual field ticket method relies on two simple materials to record data: a pen and paper. This traditional technique leads to a multitude of problems, such as data capture errors from field to office, inaccurate and untimely reporting, slow invoicing processes and accounting challenges.

What it comes down to is this: For companies still using the paper ticket process, reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency involves maximizing utilization of assets, responding to job bids and capturing proof-of-field job completion that provides real-time and historical data for expenditures, billings, invoicing, ticketing and compliance regulations.

To accomplish this feat, companies must deploy the right wireless field ticketing technology. Wireless field ticketing does not replace the paper ticket-it simply automates it. This will help achieve critical business objectives, including more proficient decision-making, advanced operations in the field, true cost savings that improves response time throughout the company and, ultimately, reduce lost productivity.

Supporting these advantages is a survey by the Yankee Group, a Boston-based independent technology research and consulting firm, where executives were asked which business strategies were most important to them. The top three strategies were(1):Improving efficiency by transforming business processes;Empowering employees via improved applications; andEnabling mobility to enhance workforce productivity.

Determining a Company's Needs

Each company has their own distinct reasons for deploying a mobile technology. A recent report conducted by Aberdeen Research, a technology fact-based research company, indicates that 68% of companies that have installed mobile devices are looking to increase technician and crew utilization. About half are looking to control escalating costs, and 45% are responding to a customer-driven demand for on-time project completion(2). The top three reasons companies decide to go mobile include enabling access to information, improving management of existing mobile applications and improving customer service(1).

Before a company can move to a wireless field ticketing solution or upgrade their existing technology, they must first determine their mobile needs. Some of the key internal questions that companies should consider include:What approach to the data collection problem will help our employees become more efficient?What kinds of unnecessary, repetitive and time consuming tasks can we avoid?How often are your field workers outside of a wireless coverage area?