Digital transformation projects usually require many complex steps. Each of these steps requires a well thought out, budgeted, and highly detailed plan. Who provides that plan will be your companies key to successfully reaching that desired destination for your operations on your time-frame and your budget requirements.

Many companies undervalue the importance of project management as a crucial component for project success. Instead the project(s) become everyone's baby; not one person. Strong leaders prefer to have one person accountable and responsible for the project as a whole; or as some leaders like to say 'one throat to choke' (I write that with a smile on my face and all due respect). This way everyone knows the exact time line, expectations and one person is in charge of the budget so it doesn't run wild.

The world moves pretty fast these days with all the constant change from every direction. To stay ahead of all the crazy it's important to consider all your options and then move quickly to implement your strategy into action.

It wasn't all that long ago many companies were faced with difficult decisions, and few of those difficult decisions are harder than layoffs. It's never an easy decision. But in a downturn, it’s a necessary evil to save the company as a whole—with great hope you can welcome those same talented people back when the inevitable upturn happens.

The hard truth is that before that upturn actually happens many of those talented people will have retired, switched career paths, started their own business or even traded their safety glasses in for sunglasses in a tropical paradise.

Companies can now measure almost every single aspect of business activity due to various analytic tools and management software. Often, they have advanced datasets to explore their performance because there are so many metrics to measure.

While navigating various datasets, anything outside the norm would be considered an anomaly. Different anomalies can have an enormous impact on business decisions, operational results, and management’s ability to respond rapidly and accurately.

The next wave of technological advancements is emerging. New technologies are expected to reduce the number of workers required to perform specific tasks while increasing demand for other skills.

A digital workforce is a workforce with personnel focused on high-value tasks and empowered with actionable data from digital technologies and services that lead to improved decision-making in daily operations. Similarly, a digital worker is considered an individual that applies actionable data from digital technologies and services to make improved decisions, automate manual functions, increase productivity, or convert information into revenue. 

More talent will be retiring in the next couple of years, making it more crucial than ever for you to strategize your workforce by upskilling your people to continue running operations effectively.

To ecstatic employees everywhere, more and more companies are moving from dreaded, time wasting daily site trips, stacks of paper records and mind-numbing manual processes to technology to provide answers that are supported by factual data, automating tasks that are driven by analytics, data trends and in some cases even autonomous actions.

Downturns, and all the crazy in our world today have made it clear that the “change or die” mantra is far too real.

You probably already knew this—but you may be hesitant to act. That's totally understandable since there are several questions about transition, affordability, training, the return on investment and so many others. Then there's the sustainability questions that come into play. Tech changes really fast these days and everyone is searching for the next best thing. While tech continues to quickly develop some people decide they should wait it out until the next hottest and newest change is available.

You may ask yourself; where exactly do you get the best possible return on investment when it comes to industrial tech that will help support your operations profitability and sustainability at the same time without it being out of date in just a few months only to have to start all over again?

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” doesn’t begin to describe winters in Wyoming, Alberta and many other parts of the world. Winter lows average well below zero, whatever scale you’re using. It’s why detailed training, safety, planning and teamwork are literally life-and-death issues as we help keep water, wastewater, gas distribution, and of course oil and gas production flowing - in even the coldest, and hottest areas of the globe.

Ask anyone that works outside in temps around 110 degrees in the complete dust and heat of summer in the Texas, or well below zero in Canada - no one leaves the yard without extensive training, preparation, and a carefully checked list, but there are still many, many safety risks to consider before venturing out.

We tend to lose a lot of things around the house like the TV remote, keys, or phone making us add more stress to our lives as we tend to frantically search for these lost items. Fortunately, we live in an era when automation exists, and you can get key finders to locate items. These detectors can be easily attached to things such as keys, bags, wallets, or even your pet, allowing you to quickly find your lost item, saving you time and stress from searching for them. It's as easy as clicking a button and you know where they are.

For the oil and gas industry, tracking the location of assets can also be a challenge. Using Emerson's Zedi Roughneck, a fixed asset management software solution, allows you to track equipment like compressors for example. When a compressor is not used, it is sometimes moved to be utilized at a different site. In my experience, the only person who would have known about this relocation would be the area foreman.

Way, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a very annoying flip phone that was really only able to make and receive calls and (upon the rare occasion) get and send a few random text messages from other techie types. The main reason I found this phone so annoying is I wanted it to be able to do so much more; and it seemed like it shouldn't be all that difficult to make it happen.

But, that's all there was on the market at the time.

I continuously wondered why on earth someone didn't make them to fetch my email, or have a decent camera in them. Then it finally became a reality and just like that we all became more mobile than we had ever dreamed of being! It was AWESOME being set free from waiting for an email, and unchained from my desk where I would often be found waiting for information to be sent.

The benefits of making oil and gas production autonomous are many. Production increases based on the ability to detect and remedy problems in seconds rather than hours is topmost, followed by safety, efficiencies when physical repairs are needed and more precision in PM schedules are among the others.

We’re not there yet—some would point out that the Oil Patch, due to its boom-and-bust nature, lags behind other industries in this area—but we’ve made big strides since the 2015-16 bust. Necessity being the mother of invention.

Maybe you’ve declared your intention to digitally transform your production. That’s great. It’s a growing trend and it will really boost efficiency. But the jury is still out on whether to do it in-house or to let us do it for you.

I have a question that may clarify that decision for you:

What are you good at?

You’re good at evaluating leases, considering how to economically produce a field and to get that oil and gas to market. If you were to jump into the field of developing a cloud based platform, what would that look like in terms of hiring, training and implementing?