Bringing The Digital Revolution to Oil and Gas Completions with Cold Bore
In the oil and gas services industry, technological change moves slowly. Operations are huge, sprawling and inherently interconnected. For all of these reasons, any sort of changes – no matter if the changes will ultimately improve processes or output – rarely happen before it’s absolutely necessary. This mostly comes down to practicality and costs.
In the field of completions, most companies completely lacked visibility into most of their day-to-day operations because the fracking revolution occurred well after the digital revolution. As the digital revolution unfolded, operators and service companies created digital control systems for their operations specifically but those platforms didn’t communicate or integrate with each other. When the fracking revolution took off, it required more collaboration than ever between service companies and operators to complete a well. Without a common operating system, companies had to cobble together data provided by the various locations and attempt to verify transactions and find opportunities to improve efficiency. Unsurprisingly, the process is complicated, inefficient and often misses significant issues.
Without a common operating system, companies had to cobble together data provided by the various locations and attempt to verify transactions and find opportunities to improve efficiency.
This is where our client, Cold Bore Technology, comes in. Cold Bore digitized fracking operations with their main product, SmartPAD, the world’s only autonomous frac completions master control system. Now, companies could actually see in real-time what was going on at their various sites and be able to make immediate determinations based off of data relayed through sensor-to-cloud technologies. They had the foundations set but they needed some help truly realizing the full output of their technology and their team. That’s where Umbrage came in.
Fully utilizing Cold Bore’s technology.
SmartPAD gave its users a true sense of autonomy in their operations and more insights into their day-to-day, allowing real time monitoring. But the application in its current state needed improvements to scale with Cold Bore’s planned growth and technological needs. Some of the changes we executed included:
- Tuned and optimized IoT sensors and Edge boxes
- Improved security strategy
- Planned and executed data tier scaling capabilities
- Formalized devops flows for improved security, scalability, reliability & cost-effectiveness
But they couldn’t continue to utilize their technology without the team to do it, which is why we facilitated the building of their software and product team to take full responsibility for the product. We scaled our support back as their team grew and matured.
Cementing Cold Bore’s place in the oil & gas services industry.
While Cold Bore already had a customer base, we knew their technology was capable of growing their company into the industry standard. We helped increase their customer base fifteen times over and then continued to support all aspects of scaling the company with sustained growth in mind. Through stakeholder interviews and customer feedback analysis, we crafted a customer engagement strategy that supported product goals. This was a crucial step in helping Cold Bore reorganize into a product company with a product-first mindset and away from an exclusively oil & gas service-based company supporting frac operations..
Building a product mindset beyond our engagement.
When Cold Bore came to us, they already had an existing product but they wanted to develop a Product mindset. We had the opportunity to share our product-minded approach as a holistic one, valuing objective driven long-term goals over reactive short-term ones. It’s the difference between being driven by outcomes versus output. This strategy guided the process of creating a product roadmap – including the infrastructure needed to support that roadmap – which is still being executed today.
We had the opportunity to share our product-minded approach as a holistic one, valuing objective driven long-term goals over reactive short-term ones.
Through our engagement, they established product as a true role in the company. This allowed their team to respond to app performance, customer feedback, and market changes, and manage these changes in real time.
Check out our case study with Cold Bore.
