Imagine for a moment you are a coach in the National Football League. At the conclusion of every season, whether it was a good one or not, you and the assistant coaches scour the countryside to recruit new talent to round out and strengthen your team. But, why? You really only need to have the best players as your starting line-up, right? Think of the money you would save if you didn’t have to have all of those other guys standing around on the sideline acting like high priced cheerleaders in hideous outfits. You would hit your performance bonus for sure.

How long would you last as a coach if you rolled out the best 22 players and a kicker and figured you would be all set to make it to game 16 with the same bodies? That’s right. You wouldn’t. It’s inconceivable the same players would survive the entire season without any injuries or other vagaries of the human behavior. You need back-ups. What happens when Brady goes down with a bad knee? Do you put the kicker in? That’s why the coaching staff places so much importance on doing the research and recruiting not only for the next star but all the other players you need as back-ups. To be successful, you need to have a depth chart. The magic comes when the back-up quarterback you selected out of Michigan in the fourth round ends up being the next Tom Brady.

A wise, old oil and gas CEO recently told me the root of all evil in the oil and gas world is poor vendor management. Producing companies suffer from the lack of a clearly defined recruiting process and the evidence of a depth chart of energy service companies. Spreadsheets just don’t get the job done. He is also the guy who espouses that, “You can’t build a house on swamp water.”

What does that mean exactly? Last month, I wrote about a theme that asks the question do you really know your vendors? In the past four years, we have worked with both service companies and producers and discovered, among a host of other weirdness, producers tend to not dive deep enough into who exactly is their starting line-up that runs out each week to the wellsite. They understand the primary strength and talent but are a bit foggy when it comes to the audible. Can they provide more to the job than what they have been recruited to provide? Who discovers this hidden

ability if all they have been told to do is show up and pass the ball 60 yards every play or, in this case, drill a hole in the ground until they get to the right spot? What else can these guys do?

This theme seems to be resounding from small companies to intermediates and right on up to the majors. Vendor enablement is lacking, because it tends to be done in a silo at each company. Each division acts independently with their own sphere of influence when it comes to building the line-up and back-ups per position or category. How does a team perform well if nobody understands what each others’ talent level and role is when the live bullets are firing? In fact, we have been asked recently by an intermediate to come in and provide assistance with their supply chain and procurement procedures and organization. This company has grown quickly by acquiring properties, and vendor enablement just wasn’t as much of a priority as it could have been. Therefore, performance is not as sharp as it could be, and mistakes are the result. Work is needed to get to know your players and what they do well. However, going back to the wise old CEO I mentioned earlier, you have to have a system, because if you build your house on swamp water, it’s going to sink. Let’s secure your house with a solid foundation, so future growth is scalable and functional.

Oilfield HUB is built to deal with the vital information 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, we take it a step further by identifying the second, third, and fourth alternative, thus building your depth chart, so when someone goes down, the replacement company has been vetted and is ready to perform, so your operation doesn’t suffer. 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 help you understand who is next.

Let us help you build a championship team.

Originally published in the 

April 2016 Issue of Oilfield PULSE