Keeping Your Drilling Equipment in Top Shape

keeping-your-drilling-equipment-in-top-shape-header

Your oil and gas drilling operation require dozens of pieces of highly specialized equipment to fill job orders. From rotating control devices to oil wells and risers, each machine comes with several specialized parts. You need your materials to be in top shape, or it jeopardizes the whole operation.

While equipment acquisitions are sometimes necessary to keep up with technology advancements, other times they’re simply because of negligence. Asset purchases are costly components of keeping up with customer performance expectations.

Once you’ve set up an operation at each drilling site, how do you make sure your equipment keeps up with consumer expectations? When your machinery is at top performance, you’re better able to meet demand and regulations on drilling activities.

Create a Drilling Equipment Maintenance Plan

Drilling equipment maintenance needs to be part of your day to day work tasks. Because this isn’t your run of the mill manufacturing equipment, spare parts are often costly. Performing some daily maintenance tasks can extend the life of your rigs and drilling setup and keep you on schedule.

How many cycles can each piece of equipment go through before it needs an inspection? What moving parts does each piece of equipment require to operate? Who has access to each piece of equipment, and for what reason? Having the answers to these questions will help you determine how often you should schedule check-ups and who to involve in the process.

Creating a plan also ensures you have rigs available when you need them. If something suddenly breaks, progress can stop for weeks. However, by identifying downtime, you can have your crews focus on other areas while rigs go in for repairs. Proper scheduling will help you optimize work tasks and keep up with consumer demand.

Keeping up with maintenance also helps you stay on top of compliance requirements, which strictly regulate your company's operations.

Keep Employees Updated on Maintenance Needs

Your employees are your best asset for keeping your equipment functioning at high standards. Informing them on early warning signs of equipment malfunction will help prevent small inconveniences from becoming significant issues.

Inform employees of equipment breakage warning signs in training and regular certification processes. Keeping your employees updated on drilling equipment maintenance needs is one of the best ways to stay ahead of problems. Your employees have the most interactions with each piece of equipment. Those working on a specific rig for a while will often insights on proper performance and strange behavior. 

Involving your employees also means you’ll have less need to hire someone to maintain equipment. It’s easy to make equipment maintenance part of their daily efforts. Add it to the list of work tasks they need to do. These actions shouldn’t take more than a few minutes and is less cumbersome than hiring someone to check on things.

Create an Accessible System

If your employees can’t get hold of you right when something starts acting up, they might forget or shrug it off. However, if you have a system they can update equipment records on, you can be notified as soon as something needs your attention.

Create a system everyone has access to, so you can be warned of problems before they become catastrophic. Having an easily accessible system helps employees feel like they have more of a say in company operations. When your employees feel involved, it often boosts their morale.

When your employees can access your system, it decreases department overhead and makes work hours more efficient. Streamlining work tasks is a great way to help you stay ahead of reducing profit margins in your industry.

By:

Mel Van De Graaff

Mel creates research driven content for companies in the health and wellness field, and specializes in creating action driven blog posts for Mental Health and Self Help topics as well as creating white papers and case studies.

Learn more from an Asset Panda expert

Get a FREE consultation with an asset tracking expert to find out how you can transform your asset tracking

Get a Demo