After many years of providing energy services software solutions and working closely with oilfield product and service companies, Jory Lamb has seen it all. As President and CEO of VistaVu Solutions, he’s observed that many otherwise well-run companies make the same operational mistakes over and over again.
“I call these the Seven Deadly Sins of Oilfield Service Companies,” says Lamb. “They’re sins because we shouldn’t be doing them. They’re deadly because they can cost you some or even most of the money you make.”
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing each of them to you here on our blog.
The 1st Deadly Sin: Lack of sales process
Consider the case of one oil and gas service company VistaVu worked with a few years back. They were a great company – worked on the manufacturing side of things and also did repairs on surface equipment. At the time, they were bidding out three projects, each in excess of $1 million. They ended up closing two of the contracts, only to find out both were scheduled for the same time frame. The trouble is, due to production and operational constraints; they could only deliver one of the projects to their usual high standards. “When this occurs, it can be a very serious problem,” says Lamb. “Operations personnel are upset because they are working overtime or under constant pressure. Margins suffer because materials are ordered at the last minute and labor is on overtime. Even the quality of the product or the deadline itself can suffer.”
In the case of this example, with a more efficient and communicative sales process, the company would have known what was coming and could resource itself appropriately.
Be sure to come back next week and check out our next post in this series, where we’ll dive into the second deadly sin – asset underutilization!
