Jun 01, 2018Global oil and gas pumps and equipment company Weir has expanded its RFID asset-management technology—designed to benefit its fracking customers—with an app, RFID tagging on its own products and those of competitors, and handheld RFID readers. Two oil and gas firms have piloted Weir's SPM RFID solution throughout the last year, and at least four other companies are now in the process of retrofitting their equipment to work with the system.
Since 2015, Weir has been tagging its products with RFID to improve visibility as they are received from customers for servicing. But more recently, the company has been looking for a way to incentivize its customers to use the tags for their own purposes. In that way, Weir could be sure the tags would remain on purchased equipment, and would thus be usable during the servicing process. The new solution includes Weir's SPM RFID mobile app for Android- and iOS-based devices that enables fracking companies to locate items on a site, and to add or retrieve certificates for each asset.
When it comes to tracking inventory, companies are challenged with large equipment, spread across a worksite, that may currently be identified only by having an employee visually read an etched serial number on a label. That label may be covered in mud, or be pointed directly into the ground. Inventory tracking requires multiple employees: one to access and read off the serial number to a co-worker, and the latter to write that information down manually and later inputs the data into a computer system. At each of these steps, there is the potential for errors, explains LJ Howell, Weir's warranty and special projects manager for oil and gas. "The entire inventory process can be very cumbersome," he says.
Additionally, paper certificates for each item are stored in an office. If an inspector comes onsite and wants to see certificates for the equipment in use, staff members must then start looking through files. Any immediate failure to find a requested certificate can lead to downtime for that equipment.
Because of inventory-tracking challenges, it can be difficult to have up-to-date visibility into what equipment is onsite at any given time, and which items are actively being used. This means some equipment may be redundant, and could simply be costing the oil and gas company money without being used. In other cases, there could be a potential shortage that would cause problems as the fracking process takes place.
Weir designs and manufactures highly engineered pressure-pumping and -control products and services for the minerals, power, and oil and gas industries. That includes the irons used in fracking operations. The customers that buy its products use them while exploring new fracking opportunities and recovering oil and gas.
There can be between eight and 25 pumps onsite at a typical location, Howell says, each with many pieces of pipe or moveable parts, such as valves. A typical site could contain approximately 900 pieces, either rigged into pumps or on standby. Tracking each part is important, not only to ensure that it can be found when needed, but also to be sure it meets certification requirements. "Each moving part has an inspection standard," Howell states, meaning it must be inspected on a rotating schedule.
In 2015, Weir began applying RFID tags to its irons as products were manufactured at its Fort Worth Texas facility, with all items being tagged by January 2016. "Our first phase was to tag everything coming out of the factory," Howell says. The second was to use RFID readers to capture inventory data regarding pieces entering the company's service locations, so that it could better understand what was onsite, as well as the status of all items.
Now, Weir has entered the third phase in offering an app enabling customers to begin taking advantage of the tag. "With the third phase," Howell explains, "we wanted to offer our customers something of value." Two of those customers—one in the United States and the other in Canada—have been testing the apps for one year. The U.S.-based company achieved the greatest benefit, he reports, using an iOS version of the app.
According to Howell, Weir found that it could capture the inventory of 900 pieces on a work site within about five hours. After using the system for a year, the firm has found that the amount of time required has been reduced to less than an hour. Manually, the inventory-counting process took three men eight hours to accomplish. With RFID, the count can be carried out by a single employee within only 45 minutes.
The system consists of the app loaded onto a mobile device. Companies are using either a Zebra Technologies 8500 or Technology Systems Ltd. (TSL) 1166 UHF RFID handheld reader that connects to a smartphone or a tablet and can either read or bar-code-scan labels.
The app can be used to retrieve certificates for each item, and employees can access the data at any time by entering the serial number or reading the tag. The app also enables users to edit data in the field, and that information can be transmitted directly to a cloud-based server. However, it comes with offline capabilities as well, so if there is no Internet access available, the reader can capture and store information until the device comes within range of a Wi-Fi network. Data can also be captured as a list, which can then be sent via e-mail.
The system allowed the U.S.-based piloting company to reduce the quantity of iron it purchases by the amount found to be redundant. This has reduced costs by between $500,000 and $700,000.
With the solution, Weir provides not only the app and back-end software, but also tags to retrofit to existing equipment onsite, including parts from other companies. Tags used for retrofitting, as well as those being applied to new Weir irons, are provided byRFID4U.
They are either applied to the flat surface of a piece of equipment via epoxy, or attached to the existing data band containing the etched serial number. A third mounting method involves the use of a zip tie epoxied onto a part. This last option may be the most common, Howell says, since customers have indicated they don't typically want RFID tags attached to the existing data band; if that band were lost or damaged, a company would lose both of its identification means.
Four companies are now retrofitting all of their equipment to use the solution, Howell reports. Those businesses are located in the United States and in other parts of the world. Now, Weir is working on a drive-through gate. In this case, Howell says, users could drive a 50-foot trailer, stacked with irons, to automatically capture the tag ID's of each item. For this deployment, the company expects it will install initially at Weir's own facility, then provide for customers at their own locations to see tagged items coming and going.
That information could help companies not only understand which items are onsite, but also receive an automatic alert in the event that a specific piece required inspection or maintenance. The fixed gate is being trialed at the entry point at one of Weir's sites, and the company expects to develop a gate that could be trialed at a customer site as well. That gate, Howell says, will be designed to be sufficiently mobile that it could be frequently moved to new fracking sites.
In the future, Howell says, the company hopes to provide predicative analysis with its app, which would enable companies to track how long a particular piece of equipment has been used, as well as when it could be forecast to reach the end of its functional lifespan. That information could help it to prevent a costly failure, as well as safety hazards for those working onsite.
