Improved Quality Assurance & Control

With thousands of producing wells and hundreds of down hole pumps, tear downs are a weekly occurrence for production and service companies and are one of the many technical reviews made by field engineering teams every day

Challenge:

An onshore operator in west Texas had an electrical submersible pump fail unexpectedly in one of their producing wells.

Existing procedures call for the operator to pull the pump from the well and conduct a tear down to inspect the pump and determine the cause of failure.

The current process requires up to 8 experts, including chemical, corrosion, mechanical and electrical engineers, from the operator and service company to travel to the shop and witness the tear down.

When you factor in lost production and time delays, the total cost of a tool failure quickly becomes expensive.

Opportunity:

Implement a solution that allows the operator to better leverage or minimize the time and resources of internal experts, reduce delays, travel time and costs and ultimately, more rapidly diagnose and resolve the pump failure.

Solution:

The well operator implemented RealityVision® to provide real-time mobile video collaboration between the engineers and technicians at the workshop and the expert advisors located in various office locations.

Real-time, high-resolution video was streamed from the workshop via RealityVision powered smart phones and Panasonic Toughbook® computers to the smart phones, laptops and console displays at the offices of the well operator and experts.

All of the needed subject matter experts and advisors were able to view and analyze, live and in real-time, the state-of-the-pump parts as they were dismantled during the tear down and provide guidance and immediate direction as to how the resolve the problem.

Value Delivered:

The well operator saved measurable time and expense by avoiding having to dispatch a full complement of experts to the tear down site. Additionally, the well operator was able to close out the failure mode analysis more rapidly – getting the pump back online more quickly. The use of RealityVision resulted in hard dollar savings and the video archive from the tool tear down also serves as a record of the tear down process and can be used for used for future training and audits.