Four years ago, I and the rest of the industry professionals that we recruited from various backgrounds and success gathered here at Leadstone Group and started down a path that at the time seemed reasonable and required. Our mission was to build a better mouse trap in the supply chain management world within the oil and gas industry. Our groups collective multitude of years of experience in the business figured that the ‘old school’ ways that have become legendary in this business were about to get a shot of new world technology that surely would be met with zeal and zest among the constituents. I mean really, think about it, the number one resource tool for finding new suppliers is still a yellow pages oil and gas directory. How could we go wrong! Let’s be the group that drags the dinosaurs into the new millennium.

Right?? Well not so much. We found out that this group is a bit stubborn. But more importantly the biggest issue is they typically already know who they want to deal with and there is no shortage of door knocking going on downtown to peddle all manner of gadgets that the buyers could ever want…so who needs another online oil and gas directory? We were getting our heads handed to us.

Until we landed on something that we didn’t realize coming out of the gate. It’s not that producing companies don’t know who they want to work with…the gap comes in the form of: how are those vendors organized and how much do you know about that company and other services they provide.

Over the past two years we have been working directly with a large engineering firm to develop a new and improved daily drilling and completions reporting software that integrates with the vendor management portion of our online business community called Oilfield HUB. Our belief is that if you tie the vendors into the entire life cycle of a well or project you are going to have better overall efficiency and fewer mistakes leading to less down time. Simply put our suite of operations tools help you save money.

Working with producers and EPC’s it is abundantly clear that the depth of knowledge about each company they work with is limited to how much interaction they have with that company or the degree of information the sales rep has divulged. Operators are focused on drilling a well…period! It is high risk and high reward. They don’t give a rat fart what is happening at other producer’s camps and they especially don’t dwell on what is going on at a supplier. That is…until they need something.

Typically the energy service company information is represented by a line item on a spreadsheet for each well. How much can you glean from that? There are fragments of information in various departments that are accumulated, assessed, verified and sent for approval. The depth of information is not necessarily shared among all parties and the organization of the details is haphazard. It’s like a text message… the depth and context can be shallow which leads to false interpretation at times.

There is a better way! Oilfield HUB is built to deal with the vital information that is required to fully understand what your supplier can do for you based on your immediate need and what other services they may be able to utilize to impact your business in the future. We work directly with service companies to understand their value proposition. We ask the question of…Why You? We help rank the service type at the producer level to identify the GO TO companies in each vital category. Then take it a step further by identifying the second, third and fourth alternative. All the information is centrally located and details can be shared on a common platform. Bid requests and ordering can be accomplished electronically and a legacy of that activity is captured for future requirements or analysis.

In our world it is not good enough to ask Who? We also want to include the HOW and WHY?

Welcome to the new millennium.

Originally published in the 

March 2016 Issue of Oilfield PULSE