After decades of pencil-and-paper pipeline tracking, the petroleum industry can save time and money and reduce risk by joining the mobile revolution and embracing Smart Energy applications, according to a recent guest article in Pipeline & Gas Journal.
Lance Fugate, Vice President of Operations with Calgary-based TerraGo partner Enmapp Pipeline Data, writes that his company’s Smart Energy mobile application, built on the TerraGo Magic zero-code platform, facilitates real-time data collection and reporting, using customer-generated maps, forms, reports and workflows, downloaded onto a smartphone or tablet computer.
The Enmapp app allows workers at the jobsite to report performance issues digitally to headquarters or the cloud, adding data-supporting video and images, even while working offline in remote areas. Headquarters can receive data, evaluate it and transmit solutions to the field quickly, reducing downtown and return trips to job sites for remedial work, Fugate writes. It also means data collection tasks that have been contracted out to service firms can instead be performed in-house by workers who are already savvy in the use of smartphones and tablet computers and need little extra training.
Responsibility for welds and other quality issues is tracked and quickly available for the growing number of reports demanded by safety and regulatory compliance agencies and by environmental monitoring organizations.
Fugate suggests that, to make this work, pipeline contractors and service companies are going to have to depart from legacy procedures and join the migration to Smart Energy applications. Their reward will be more data collected and reported, less expensively and more quickly, with fewer mistakes.
In addition, they will find they have more invested employees, a quickly quantifiable contribution to the bottom line through return on investment, and a lessoning of risk for pipeline stakeholders.
To read the full Pipeline & Gas Journal article, please click here.