How to Improve Your Drilling Rig Preventative Maintenance

No matter how good your preventive maintenance program is, there will always be times when something goes wrong with your drilling rig. When this happens, it's critical to have a process to handle the issue quickly and efficiently.

This article will discuss some tips for improving your preventive maintenance inspections.

Create an Early Warning System to Manage Risk

The first step to improving your drilling preventive maintenance is to create an early warning system to manage risk. This system should be designed to identify potential problems before they occur.

There are a few different ways you can do this:

• Use data from your previous preventive maintenance inspections to create a predictive model that will help you identify potential issues before they occur.

• Conduct regular audits of your preventive maintenance program to ensure that your team follows it correctly and that all potential risks are being addressed.

• Create a system for tracking preventive maintenance issues so you can see trends and identify areas of improvement.

Some of the latest inspection software tools provide companies with real-time data that serves as an early warning system to help you avoid disaster and the loss of millions of dollars. For example, a few years ago, a team of Chevron engineers working remotely in Texas was able to identify an overload problem with a gas injection compressor at their Sanha field, off the coast of Angola 7,000 miles away, simply by looking at the data.

See What's Working and What's Failing on a Global Scale

Once you have an early warning system in place, it's essential to track the performance of your preventive maintenance program on a global scale. In other words, connect all the dots instead of looking at each dot in isolation. Major problems usually begin with minor issues. For example, chipped paint might not seem like a big deal, but it can cause rusting and disintegration down the line and trigger an expensive catastrophe.

By tracking preventive maintenance issues on a global scale, you can quickly identify which have the biggest impact and address them before they cause major problems. In addition, you can see what's working and what's failing so you can make changes to your rig maintenance program as needed.

There are a few different ways you can do this:

• Track the number of preventive maintenance issues that arise each month and compare it to the number of issues that were addressed by your preventive maintenance program. If you find that you only resolved a few of the problems identified, then there is definitely something wrong with your program that needs closer scrutiny.

• Checklists can ensure that your maintenance staff access every maintenance/inspection timetable aspect. You should customize checklists to be as detailed as you need them to be. For example, you can include the inspection's findings - who conducted it, what they found, and whether any anomalies were corrected. Also, use inspection tools that allow you to instantly upload the data to the cloud, where it's stored securely.

• Conduct a regular review of your preventive maintenance program to identify areas for improvement.

• Track the performance of your drilling rig over time to see how preventive maintenance is impacting its overall performance. It is also important to benchmark this against best practices in the industry and real-industry data to see where you can make improvements.

Identify Vendor Issues

Another way to improve your preventive maintenance program is to identify vendor issues. You can do this by tracking the performance of your drilling rig over time and comparing it to the performance of other rigs in your fleet.

If you notice that one of your drilling rig is consistently underperforming, it could indicate that there is a problem with the vendor or that the specific equipment is old or in a state of disrepair.

You can also track the number of preventive maintenance issues that arise each month specific to one vendor's equipment. This will help you identify which vendors are not meeting your standards.

By tracking vendor performance, you can quickly identify which vendors are not meeting your expectations and take action to improve the situation, either by raising the matter with the vendor or performing new procurement with a different supplier.

Make Data-oriented Decisions

Finally, make decisions that are informed by real-time data. However, you can only do this if you discard antiquated inspection methods such as spreadsheets, paper, and clipboards. You need to be able to track preventive maintenance issues in real-time to make data-driven decisions. In addition, you also need historical data at your fingertips with user-friendly analytics. This is only possible via inspection software.

FTQ360 is an excellent option because it allows you to simplify complex inspections. Your inspectors capture and store inspection data right on their mobile devices in the field. This data is uploaded to the cloud, where every stakeholder can access it.

More importantly, FTQ360 allows you to interrogate the data with its insightful dashboards and reports quickly, know which questions to ask, and make data-driven decisions. This feature is crucial because it allows you to see the big picture and connect all the dots. Engineers also use the data to refine rig designs.

FTQ360 software helps your rig maintenance program on two levels:

1. Triage and issue fixing

2. General health levels, for example, you can determine if an issue is unique to one well/drilling rig or on a global level.

For more information on how to improve your drilling rig preventive maintenance program, sign up for a free demo today.