Avoiding Downtime at Maverick Natural Resources

Maverick Natural Resources (Maverick) is a results-driven, private oil and natural gas company with a strong focus on assets in Texas and Oklahoma in the USA. It added Ultimo’s best of breed enterprise asset management (EAM) to its tech landscape over just a few months this year.  

Without a powerful EAM platform, it can be difficult for oil & gas companies to keep track of assets, manage work orders and schedules, and ensure compliance with safety and regulatory requirements. 

Avoiding downtime

One of the big upsides to EAM technology, is the ability for organizations to make better decisions about their assets regardless of what age they are. And you can do your own scoring. 

“Before, we’d have an office meeting beginning of the day to plan work schedules,” explains Patrick. “Target wise we’re always looking to get our most critical production online first. Urgent maintenance orders might come in over text to the group of technicians, but it’s not necessarily the person closest to the faulty asset that sees the text and attends the scene. Noone likes the facility group chats, because all we’re working on what’s broken. And when things break, we lose production. Now we can high rank those critical jobs and make sure everyone is aware of that for more efficient job assignments.” 

“By the end of 2024 we plan to have all our preventative maintenance data uploaded into Ultimo,” continues Patrick. “There we can compare pieces of equipment in the field, look at failures and judge when we do preventative maintenance on specific assets. For example, we can look at all our single well head compressors and see we’re doing preventative maintenance every 45 days and compare the failure rate with those with a maintenance span of 60 days. This might highlight an opportunity to extend the preventative maintenance window, save costs and do what’s best for the asset. Otherwise, we’re either blindly following what manufacturers dictate or running it until it breaks.”  

Maverick is in the early stages of connecting Ultimo via the Power BI dashboards to its entire universe of production data. Consolidating that for its operators and maintenance technicians is the goal. 

“The data we didn’t expect to capture is time to completion and accuracy of diagnosis,” continues Patrick. “For example, when an automation technician gets to location and finds a fault. They can check the history of the asset on their phone and immediately see that another technician replaced the same thing the previous week. They might then question whether the screen is faulty, or whether perhaps new wiring is required.” 

“We’re not tracking it yet, but we can see repeat failures,” continued Patrick. “Tracking that is next steps. Finding nuggets like that is opening our eyes to what we can do with data.” 

Sustainability and governance

Safety is of paramount importance at Maverick and it’s a theme that runs throughout the culture of the entire organization. Protecting the environment is equally important for company, which endeavors to minimize the company’s footprint on air, water and land through technology and innovation. 

A responsible energy producer, Maverick is resolved to continuously improving its environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. The company’s executive leadership sets ambitious ESG targets and challenges all employees to exceed set goals while operating in the safest, most sustainable way. 

In practice, a good EAM solution can benefit an organization’s environmental strategy in a number of ways. Timely maintenance, and maintenance aligned to correct procedures can help to prevent environmental incidents. Keeping equipment and systems well-maintained also assures better energy efficiency, while a consistent production process without unplanned downtime assures lower carbon emissions. 

Automating work orders

Part of Patrick’s role in the facilities management team is enabling field technicians to be safe, and prepared. This includes setting the threshold that defines when an asset is failing and the resulting cost to the business. 

“We separate production operations from facilities maintenance,” explains Patrick. “Our operators ensure that the wells are flowing. Also, that our oil, water and gas is leaving how it should, whether that’s by pipeline, truck or other. All facilities maintenance work is now done in Ultimo. Anything that involves maintenance technicians, specialist technicians, electricians, automation technicians, fixing transfusers, and workstreams that operations can’t do.” 

He explains, “We’re looking at what is down, where.  Experienced operators can see something is wrong, and perhaps know it can only be fixed by an electrician for example. They can then expediate an effective work order automatically without needing a site visit to check things.” 

Being prepared also involves integration with purchasing and inventory. When parts are required for example, Ultimo can create a requisition and send it to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.  

Maverick worked with implementation partner MaxGrip, who customized Ultimo to have a lot of drop downs. It allows for comments, part numbers, and details of what has been replaced – all in just one or two sentences. Data such as date of asset manufacture is already in the Ultimo system. All of this means there’s less ‘free text’ that’s difficult to analyze, and Maverick can get more granular with very specific data. Maverick’s success can be attributed, in part, to the dedicated efforts of Ultimo’s implementation partner MaxGrip, which successfully managed a project that aligned with our mutual client’s goals.

Watch the full IFS Unleashed breakout session about enabling oil & gas organizations to optimize costs, improve revenue certainty, and be the most sustainable versions of themselves here. To find out more about achieving unparalleled asset visibility – from field through to financials, book a demo with us.