Company: Summit Energy Services, Williston, ND
Operation: Oil field services such as road building, storange tank fabrication, site reclamation, and pad and flow line construction
Problem: Fast-growing Summit Energy Services has about 165 employees and 100 vehicles ranging in size from Ford F-150 pickup trucks to flatbed semi-trailers and Class 8 tractors deployed in the oil fields of western North Dakota. The work area is vast and the work force, by necessity, decentralized and highly mobile. That makes managing things such as worker safety, maintenance, asset utilization, and truck idling more challenging than it is for many other kinds of operations.
“We’re extremely isolated in some areas,” notes Travis Edwards, operations manager for Summit. “You can break down in the middle of nowhere with no phone reception and be stuck there. With the winters we have in North Dakota, that’s pretty dangerous.”
The mix of equipment in the fleet combined with the variety of projects the company works on also makes assuring that the right people and equipment are in the right location especially critical. The same is true when it comes to in-field maintenance; dispatching the closest maintenance team is important in terms of time and cost. No one wants underutilized vehicles, either.
“Any one truck can cost us a job, and one job can cost us our reputation with a particular company,” observes Edwards. “In the long run, that costs a lot of money.”
Solution:
To help address these mission-critical issues, Summit implemented Ford Crew Chief powered by Telogis. Although it is offered by Ford, it can also be deployed on other equipment and is currently in use on a number of Dodge and Kenworth trucks, as well as on the fleet’s Fords.
The system utilizes a “black box” wired into the truck that collects and transmits data back to a Software-as-a Service (SaaS) program. According to Summit, which is a 100% veteran-owned private company, a big advantage to this approach is that the data can be accessed by any Internet-enabled device via a login function.
Selected Summit employees have full or customized access to the reports, as does the company’s primary Ford dealership, Select Ford of Williston. The result has been significant improvements in all the areas of most concern to Summit, as well as additional improvements in reporting and certain processes.
Equipment allocation and utilization, for instance, has been greatly enhanced by the new system, according to Edwards. “It seems to help our superintendents quite a bit,” he notes. “They can actually see where our guys are and coordinate and distribute it [sic], whereas in the past we were relying on cell phones and calling back and forth…One glance at [the software display now] and you know where they’re at.”
Maintenance operations are also more efficient. Edwards recounts one example by way of illustration: “My maintenance guy was coming back from the field, and someone else called in and said they needed help. I was able to stop [the maintenance technician] and turn him around. I knew he was close; he was within a mile. [In the past], we would have had to send someone from the shop here, and that saved us a bunch of time and money.”
The Ford dealership’s service department also gets real-time alerts concerning maintenance-related issues, including tire pressure, engine oil life remaining, water in the diesel fuel, and other fault codes. According to Edwards, that advanced notice helps to speed up service and repair.
Asset utilization has also improved. For instance, Edwards is now notified if a truck has been sitting without being started for more than two days and engine idling has been reduced by about 75%.
The system has really proven its value to the company. So much so that Summit will install it in all future trucks.
