Drakewell turns hard data aggregation projects into easy afternoon exercises.
“What would have taken two of us two weeks of 8-hour days took me about 4 hours...
Not only was I able to focus on running operations, be home with my family in the evenings, and build trust through transparency with a new client, my business doesn’t need additional G&A just to keep up databases and manipulate data. Drakewell FieldOps and Analytics handled it all.”
– Operations Manager, Drakewell Client
The Day to Day Pain of Data Management
Alison Grogan: I was chatting with your boss last week and he mentioned that y’all got a request for a ton of information from a potential new client. He said he rolled his eyes thinking it would take y’all weeks to put it together, but you were done with it in just a couple of days, right?
Operations Manager: Haha yes, it only took a couple of days. Less, probably.
Alison Grogan: Wow. That’s great to hear. Would you be willing to tell me more about it and compare it to what it was like at your prior companies and pre-Drakewell?
Operations Manager: Of course. It was a request from an operator we didn’t know much about. Nor did they know much about us. So part of “getting to know us” was basically to ask us for an entire year’s worth of run data plus this year to date, so about 15 total months of performance data.
“…before Drakewell whether we even had the information somewhere was a big question.”
Alison Grogan: That’s about, what, between 400 and 600 runs. Specifically, what did they want to know?
Operations Manager: For motors, they wanted to know total drilling hours, footage, failures, and runs. They wanted it broken down by motor size, configuration, and well section, though that’s indicated by the motor size.
For MWD, they wanted…
Alison Grogan: Wait, they wanted motors and MWD broken down individually?
Operations Manager: [chuckling] Yep. So for MWD they wanted similar information. Runs, hours, footage, and failures broken down by well section.
Alison Grogan: That’s quite a bit of information.
Without Drakewell
Operations Manager: Yeah. And before Drakewell whether we even had the information somewhere was a big question. You try to capture as much information as you can but there’s only so much you can do when you have people cleaning Hawkeye and Winserv files manually. Stuff will always get lost.
Alison Grogan: So, what would you have done before Drakewell or what did you do when you worked at larger service companies?
Operations Manager: Oh. Gosh. This would have taken weeks. Easily two weeks of solid eight hour days. [laughed] I’d have probably quit. I mean, we would have gotten them the information they asked for but it would have been “the best we could do” and it would have taken a while. We wouldn’t have had a lot of confidence in what we were giving them but certainly would have provided what we could have to the best of our ability.
“…what would have taken two of us two weeks of 8-hour days took me about 4 hours.“
Alison Grogan: You’d have had to sift through job files, I guess?
Operations Manager: Yeah. Most service companies have a filing system they use. People keep it up to date manually. We all get the emailed reports from the field each day and we would have people manually keeping all our internal spreadsheets up to date and putting the files where they need to be. So to get the specific information this operator wanted I would have had to go through each job number and manually go through BHA reports. Our MWD data was pretty good so that wouldn’t have taken as long, but still.
Alison Grogan: OK. So two weeks of eight hour days is 80 hours of work just for the specific needs of this one potential client. If a person makes $50/hr that cost the company over $4,000 of a person’s time. That’s not running operations or dealing with other day-to-day stuff.
Operations Manager: Yeah. Those would have been long days because we would have had to keep up with everything else or have someone on staff to to focus only on that project.
Life in Operations with Drakewell
Alison Grogan: I certainly hope Drakewell benefited you here! Y’all have been running Drakewell FieldOps and R&M for a couple of years now and Analytics for about a year. What did it take for you to get all this pulled together?
Operations Manager: Ah, man. The request came in on a Friday and I sent him over a really comprehensive spreadsheet/dashboard I made on a Tuesday. I worked on it for about four total hours across Friday and Monday.
“And I didn’t work over the weekend – rode horses with my kid…”
Alison Grogan: Seriously!? I mean, I believe you. But sometimes people don’t believe how much time Drakewell really saves people.
Operations Manager: Yeah dead serious. It was awesome. I used the Run Summary Dashboard y’all have in Analytics. I did have to do a little bit of work making sure data was accurate or filling in some missing information, but the gaps were from when guys were first ramping up on Drakewell, so older jobs. All the more recent information I didn’t have to touch.
Alison Grogan: That’s a 95% improvement in time. 80 hours and $4,000 to 4 hours and $200 worth of someone’s time.
Operations Manager: And I didn’t work over the weekend – rode horses with my kid and wasn’t so tired from being bogged down and overwhelmed! Yeah it was a massive time and energy saver. Especially in this market.
Making an Impact
Alison Grogan: Any other benefits or takes from this? I can’t thank you enough for sharing this with us.
Operations Manager: Of course. I mean, the drilling engineer was really impressed with the level of information he got from us. We were able to provide more than he thought he’d ever get and it helped us prove to him that a recommendation on, say a change to a motor in the lateral, was really based on the data we could all look at as opposed to there being doubt around why we were making that recommendation.
“…it was a massive time and energy saver, especially in this market.”
Alison Grogan: What do you mean by doubt behind the recommendation?
Operations Manager: Well, we’re always trying to improve. But I think when drilling engineers just get numbers in an email from us that we can’t immediately back up, then really why are we making it? Are we suggesting shifting from a specific 5” motor configuration in the lateral because we don’t have any of those motors in inventory? Or is it truly because we’ve seen some issues with them so we’d want to make that adjustment. We were able to provide enough detailed information quickly enough that he could see why we were making the recommendation we were. It helped him trust us more quickly and helped all of us have an intelligent conversation using data.