Spotlight on Oil and Gas mining

How fleet tracking drives safety, efficiency and profitability

Every fleet-reliant business is unique. But oil and gas fleets have specific needs not found in any other industry. Balancing the highest of safety standards with a need for near-constant uptime at maximum capacity is no mean feat – but it’s the challenge that faces oil and gas businesses on a daily basis.

Oil and gas vehicles and equipment do much more than facilitate operations. They are profit-making assets, extracting, processing and transporting vital resources at all times. Any lapse in utilisation or productivity can have huge implications for profitability. That’s why many in the industry are looking to telematics and GPS solutions to improve processes, drive efficiency, monitor activity and, of course, promote safety across all operations. Here are just a few of the ways that such solutions can help.

Keep a close eye on the field

With a comprehensive GPS fleet and field tracking solution, you can keep tabs on your mobile operation wherever you are. Vehicle location data makes it easy to monitor how long workers spend on job sites, while geofencing and digital forms mean inspection and compliance are more straightforward than ever before.

By tracking employee location and vehicle status, you can keep tabs on when vehicles are active and idle to check all work is carried out as expected. Finally, with easy plug and play tracking devices, you can monitor third-party contractors while on the job, too, leaving no gaps in your knowledge.

Prioritise productivity

When you monitor the activity of your mobile operation with GPS technology, you can find out what’s making money (and what isn’t) in just a few clicks.

Adding asset tracking to your solution can help you contend with fluctuating oil prices by turning the spotlight on areas of inefficiency. So, you can quickly spot underutilisation to make smarter business decisions. Managing your operation in this way can make it easier to manage your resources across job sites or streamline your equipment to realise greater cost savings.

When you track your assets, you can view engine on hours for vehicles and other powered assets like cranes and excavators. Within seconds, you can view live status and activity history information for any asset or group of assets to respond faster to client and site needs.

Finally, with cellular connectivity, you can track almost any asset – both powered and non-powered – almost anywhere.

Keep your vital assets moving

With each part of your operation generating vital revenues, any downtime can be debilitating for an oil and gas fleet. It is also not an easy problem to solve, as customised machinery and high rental charges make finding temporary replacements almost impossible.

That’s why the best way to protect against downtime is to ensure all vehicles and equipment are in the best possible condition. Fleet management technology can help, making it easy to follow all recommended service schedules. Automated tracking of usage hours and miles means you can set accurate reminders to help keep routine maintenance carried out on time, every time.

It is also possible to set health alerts to trigger when issues are detected within vehicles and certain pieces of machinery. This can help reduce breakdown and downtime by drawing your attention to a potential problem before it becomes a more serious and costly issue.

Put safety first, always

Safety is paramount in the oil and gas industry, where the transportation and processing of hazardous materials are commonplace, often in dangerous conditions or remote locations.

With the help of a GPS fleet tracking solution, business owners and fleet managers can monitor the status and whereabouts of all vehicles and equipment to confirm all is well. Information collected on driving styles, such as speeding, harsh cornering and late braking, can also be used to coach safe behaviours. In-cab alerts can also be set whenever these bad habits occur to draw immediate attention to the issue.

Working with such a solution in place helps to make safety a daily part of everyone’s role. Employees get the tools to learn from and change behaviour, sometimes in near real-time, while management has the tools to develop, enforce and monitor safety policies.

Give your operation an edge

From tracking tools to digital portals, Verizon Connect’s suite of applications is designed to improve and automate your oil and gas business. To see our solution in action, book a free demo today.