Google Data

Posted by Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd.

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Zachary Curry, Manager of Information Systems at Pure Energy Services Ltd., a publicly traded oilfield services company headquartered in Calgary. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Since 2001, Pure Energy has provided equipment and services for oil- and gas-producing companies in Canada and the U.S. In recent years we’ve grown nearly 20% per year, and today Pure Energy employs over 1,500 people based in our corporate offices and at more than 20 field locations. With 90% of our staff working outside of our corporate office, we needed a system that could better manage our expansion, easily accommodate new users and provide access to our staff in the field.

Using Google Apps helped transform some of our internal processes, allowing us to work more efficiently. Our business requires a lot of safety and task documentation, and each employee in the field must complete training for hundreds of tasks. Even though we’ve implemented multiple systems to help manage these tasks, there were still operational gaps and paper-based processes. Google Docs helped us simplify the tedious and time consuming task of managing these processes and tasks. Now that we’re moving the majority of our documentation to Docs, our station managers can more easily provide up-to-date information to their field staff and our corporate executives in shared files. In certain business units, we’ve also started to use Google Forms to track job training completion for each employee, making it easy for station managers to see exactly which employees can complete certain jobs at a glance.

Google Apps Scripts has helped us streamline our equipment utilization tracking processes. In the past, our corporate office had to compile 20 individual spreadsheets sent in from our field locations that was then manually inputted into a single spreadsheet. By the time the main corporate spreadsheet was updated, the information was usually out of date and therefore largely irrelevant for decision making purposes. Using Apps Scripts, we now get real-time updates of our equipment utilization through automatic email notifications to our managers at corporate office, saving us time in completing this important operational task.

With a growing company, particularly one that’s as geographically dispersed as ours, it’s important to have a dependable and easy-to-use Information System in place. Google Apps has helped us streamline numerous internal processes all while keeping us connected and collaborating efficiently.