Tecpetrol Customer Story

The Tecpetrol team needed to reduce pen and paper manual processes across their teams and oilfield sites. The organization had been heavily paper-centric with sub-contractors receiving work orders to assign and complete jobs. At the end of a working day, these contractors - and Tecpetrol uses a lot of them, over 1000 firms over the past two years - would file reports on their hours worked and parts used, reports which would then have to be checked by the firm’s full-time supervisors.

At the end of the month, head office would have to deploy admins for 2-3 days to proof reports for accuracy and even then there was a lack of control over optimizing third party contractor performance and utilization. Contractors could be in the field for weeks at a time with Tecpetrol having no real view of hours worked, jobs completed etc.

They needed an automated system to simplify and speed up that process. They needed a tool to support urgent work order requirements for their customers. The teams didn't have a solution for collecting service data that they could use for future visits, optimizing team performance, future planning, or service revenue opportunities.

Overall, they wanted to improve the certification process for their 3rd party contractors. In order to process payments for contractors, they needed to validate and approval time and materials first. Avoiding delays was important.

Previously they had to send internal supervisors to the oil fields to manage all validation and approvals which was very time consuming.

With ServiceMax they are digitizing these processes so that their resources could be spent optimizing their service offerings and delivering excellent customer service. The Tecpetrol team selected ServiceMax because of three main differentiators. ServiceMax stood out from other field service management solutions because of their deep knowledge of field service processes and deep industry expertise. ServiceMax also offered the most robust options for expanding the solution. They promised a quick integration with other key technology systems and were well equipped for a future roll out of IoT capabilities.

Tecpetrol went live with the first phase of its ServiceMax deployment in 2018, part of a wider digital transformation program known as InDY - Innovacion Digital en el Yacimiento (Digital Innovation in the Oil Field).

The goal was to modernize connectivity in oil field sites where internet was limited or not available. Wifi transmitters were installed on vehicles to receive and pass on information for technicians in the field in real-time.

The TecPetrol team focused on training and user adoption as a part of their implementation. They saw the internal team, the deliver team at ServiceMax, the top management at TecPetrol and the key users operations team.

TecPetrol is focused on improving the experience of 3rd party contractors, reducing the amount of time spent on their certification process requirements. They want to see improvements in work order management and scheduling.

Contractors now use ServiceMax on iPads to fill out work orders and other information previously confined to paper. The real-time nature of the solution is critical. Dispatchers can now see exactly what is happening in the field and can see at once if there are problems that need to be addressed. It also enables traceability of data to provide visibility of tasks and their average time to address. This helps to productivity comparisons among contractors as well as to identify skills gaps that need to be addressed.

And from the contractors' point of view, they are now able to invoice online and be paid within 20 days, a significant improvement, which helps with employee satisfaction.

TecPetrol plans to increase the scope of their ServiceMax platform, added another 500 ServiceMax users in the first 6 months. They'll continue to invest in their change management process and focus on continous improvements.