How Technology Helps in Rig Scheduling?

Posted by Binita Jaiswal on March 25th, 2019

Rig scheduling is one important area of the overall oil production activity. Due to the number of rigs available and the production demands, it becomes necessary to periodize and optimize production with the available rigs. This is exactly where a rig scheduling technology from oilfield services companies comes in handy.

The operations team has the onus of allocating production from different rigs. They need to be tactically utilized to ensure better productivity and yield. While earlier, scheduling was done on spreadsheets, the activity clearly isn’t suited for medium to large scale operations where multiple rigs are involved. In order to boost efficiency, oilfield companies and increasingly investing in rig scheduling technology solutions to meet their scheduling and operational needs.

How Do Technology Solutions Help?

A good rig scheduling solution helps to manage well workloads and various activities like drilling, fracs, and testing. It also helps analyze the workovers and completions. It helps supervisors to share schedule files and logs with other members to streamline the entire drilling process and enhances the collaboration potential between teams within an organization. The authorized staff can easily drag and drop jobs as per the latest schedule. This way, the latest updated schedule is always available with the concerned personnel within the teams.

On the collaboration front, the staff can share files, raise queries, answer them and even update the status of completion or milestones achieved. Supervisors can review vendor availability and rig contracts to ensure continuous labor flow for better efficiency for the oilfield services companies. 

Some of the benefits on offer include:

1 – Better Visibility

 A good rig scheduling solution will improve the scheduling visibility across the board. This makes the scheduling work efficient and quicker.

2 – Less Risk

Spreadsheet based schedulers are prone to human errors and loss of productivity. With an up-to-date scheduling software, the oilfield services companies can deliver better value in the overall oil drilling and production activity.

3 – Alerts and Notifications

All authorized users will be alerted about important alerts like permit expiry or task scheduling. This way the work happens without any stoppages or glitches.

These advantages show how crucial rig scheduling software is becoming in today’s times of production complexities and shrinking margins.

What Features Need To Be Present In A Rig Scheduling System?

Ask any oilfield services companies and they will corroborate the need for a feature-packed rig scheduling system. They can bring a substantial impact to CapEx and Opex of an oilfield company and ensure all activities are kept streamlined for operational efficiencies.

Some of the must-have features that a right scheduling system needs to have include –

1 – Visible Schedule

The solution needs to show all corporate scheduling at one centralized place. This provides a sense of clarity to all employees about their work for a particular day or phase. No more lack of communication, non-updated information, or productivity loss.

2 – Universal Appeal

Users can easily make use of intuitive drag and drop options in order to move the job allocations and re-schedule tasks. They do not need formal training for these basic steps.

3 – Model Scenarios

Operations managers get total optimization options for planning, budgeting, and re-scheduling with the help of powerful scenario analysis features.

4 – Authenticated User Profile

Different teams should be given access to only data that is valid for them. They will be presented with custom views that ensures better utility value from such a solution. So, a team from drilling or construction will see a different view than a frac or production operations personnel.

5 – Analysis Made Easy

Monitoring NPT and rig analytics become easy when a technology-centric solution is at the heart of an all-round rig scheduling solution.

6 – Total Visibility through Reports

Comprehensive reporting and dashboards make it easy to track KRAs and its performance at rig level. Such deep insights give a lot of confidence to the decision- making process and ensure that operations go on as intended.

Such rig scheduling solutions will prove to be a boon to oilfield services companies. They can ensure there are no double allocations or missed allocations of jobs on every rig. This makes certain that every rig well enjoys optimal productivity levels, which in turn, boosts the revenue generation capabilities of the oil wells.