What if your wells or pipelines could call you up and tell you they were sick before they went down?

If you’ve ever gone to the doctor to get some medicine at the first sign of a fever—to try to shorten the illness—you understand what I mean.

Most of the time now, in the oil patch, the first we know of a problem is when the pump breaks down, the compressor slams on the brakes, a valve gives way or there’s some other catastrophic—and expensive—problem.

What if we could use Big Data to start detecting the lead-up to a problem and fix it before it became a shutdown or, in the case of a pipeline, a big leak? It could help our people work smarter by doing small jobs in time to reduce the major ones.

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