Drilling Fluids

MudWorks; Custom, Cloud-Based Drilling Fluids Software

The Drilling Fluids industry has evolved over the years to rely on data and embrace technology.  MudWorks seized on this trend and developed a custom, cloud-based drilling fluids, inventory and project management software that can be as robust and comprehensive as needed.  MudWorks has delivered an all-in-one premium software package that rivals big industry at a price point that small and mid-sizes companies can afford.  This article illustrates the customizable, client-centric approach MudWorks takes with each drilling fluids company.

Carter Krummrich, Owner and Visionary behind MudWorks walked into the front office of a mid-size drilling fluids company and was buzzed in through the front door to meet with the owner. His drilling fluids company had been using MudWorks, drilling fluids software since August of 2018. The purpose of this meeting to develop an inventory management feature that links their warehouse operations to the active wells in the field.

When they first started using MudWorks, they had questions.  As with anything new, they were concerned if it was glitchy, and did the software have a robust annular hydraulics system and volume accounting system? How did the inventory tracking and cost system work? They took a chance on us and found some parts of the software that didn’t work for them.  A benefit of MudWorks, is that it’s not an off-the-shelf “as-is” software. We were on the phone with them every day redesigning, troubleshooting immediately. They needed a more robust field ticketing system than we currently had – that the other clients were happy with. They needed a better way to account for third-party trucking tax rates and costs in the software. Certain items and features that we had created needed to be retooled to fit their needs. With the help of our team of programmers we worked around the clock to deliver these items and finally got it to the point where their office, the field engineers, and our software team had a product that sang, customized just for their unique challenges.

For a boutique software company like MudWorks, sometimes the task can feel Olympic in scale. We had just finished creating a mandatory safety feature that forces the field engineers to complete their JSA’s and safety tasks before they can create their next report. We’d also just finished a custom volume tracking system for a Mid-Continent client. We thought we had addressed everything and could focus on growing the business.

Then we got the call from the client mentioned earlier. “How can we make this inventory project happen?” We’d been meeting over the last year and one of the major pain points for them was how to streamline each and every inventory item that entered their warehouse and went into the field.

We set the meeting and were in their office within a week. We met with their field coordinator, warehouse manager and, their efficiency specialist, who pushed new key performance indicators he wanted to be embedded into the software. All had become fans of the MudWorks and were on it every day. But we all knew it was time to take it to the next level. The task at hand was to account for every item that entered the warehouse in the software. Field engineers are going to be able to send out a request to the warehouse manager when inventories on the rig get low. The warehouse will receive and evaluate the request and send out a shipment to that rig with a QR code attached to the shipment.

QR codes have become an extremely useful tool for business owners. It’s like a barcode with the potential to hold hundreds of times more information. We planned to generate QR codes for each shipment. When the field engineer receives the shipment, he can simply scan the QR code on third party apps available for the iPhone and Android and it will automatically populate their inventory on their reports. If his inventory is wrong after performing a physical count, he can “dispute” the shipment and send it back to the warehouse and they can fix it on their end. We are creating a two-way conversation and taking the human error out of it.

During a planning break, they lamented about a mud engineer who’d cost them $30,000 USD by fudging his product usage and trucking hours. He also discussed the drilling fluids business model as a whole. He was frustrated by the fact that some of his profits were sitting on the warehouse floor. He would often submit bids to operators and engineers and get promised work but a contract would fall through or it wasn’t as much work as anticipated. Many specialty products such as gets cannot be reused and sits there on the floor. Other times they ordered too much gel or barite for a given month and client and only needed 80% of it.

That’s what we are really doing here. We are not just designing a new feature for MudWorks that will increase its value significantly like the inventory project. We have built a user-friendly cloud-based drilling fluids software platform that collects data as its primary function. That data doesn’t sit in a hard drive somewhere on the coordinator or field engineer’s computer. It lives in the same space as all of the other data collected by the entire company over time. It’s all of the well data, mud checks, volume tracking, annular hydraulics, operation summaries, recommended mud treatments, comments, cost, and inventory tracking for individual operators, fields, and leases. T? So, what can we do with that data?

The answer is that we find useful trends. How does this inventory feature in MudWorks solve their real problem? We cross-reference the product ordering records over time for their stock points and compare them against real inventory usage in the field for each operator. He will be able to know how much product to order for an operator or troublesome field before future projects start up, alleviating overhead bloat. Need to order more LCM for Field X in July? Check.

The Oil and Gas industry as a whole has been relatively slow to embrace cloud-based technology but major operators and oilfield service companies are moving in this direction. Many of these larger companies have developed in-house software programs that are not available to small and mid-market companies. Why should the majors be the only ones to benefit from cloud-based technologies? Click here to learn how Easy it is to Use our MudWorks Software.

These companies should have access to a software platform that enables them to glean meaningful, actionable insight from data. The ability to identify anomalies and trends and find opportunities to get leaner and smarter is paramount, especially in the current, volatile oil and gas market. Imagine having the tools to predict future performance, optimize production, and maximize profits all wrapped into a software dashboard that takes an owner or manager to the right data at the right time.

What is the true value of MudWorks cloud-based drilling fluids reporting software? It’s all in the code that we’ve built over the years, the platform itself. The ability to customize features to fit clients’ needs quickly didn’t happen overnight. MudWorks started out as the brainchild of ex-Chevron engineers who developed the mothership product called WellWorks, software that allowed engineers to plan wells and estimate service contractor bids and predict AFE’s. The engineers would plan and the drill site managers would report against the plan. Click here to learn more about our Mud Reporting features.

Before the oil price collapse in 2015, the company team of software programmers and drilling engineers realized that the more features they built, the more the reports were customizable to oilfield service industries. With the help of their first drilling fluids client, the team built out an entire mud reporting system. Mudworks as we see it today was developed at this time. Then the crash happened and MudWorks sat dormant with the one client faithfully planning, reporting and collecting precious data. When the industry started picking back up, MudWorks added more companies and have found that each one has slightly different needs. We’re proud of the fact that we can react, create, and program to satisfy each one, whether their work is in the Western US, the Bakken, Eagle Ford, Off-Shore Europe or the Middle East.

As the week of planning went by, their office slowly started to fill in with new members who all had input., The office manager, wanted to know how the software would communicate with her accounting software. The Efficiency Specialist kept adding KPI’s he’d like to see and the Field Coordinator had ideas for more complex equations for the field. With a fleshed-out inventory management system and new batch of data trends and analytics to program into MudWorks I left the office ready to carry the torch back to the software programmers.

This year MudWorks is excited about finding the right drilling fluids companies, engineers, and geologists to help us develop analytics tools that will really make a difference on the bottom line. In this uncertain market, we believe real innovation is going to take place by mining and harnessing big data rather than developing new methods for field applications. It will be about making informed decisions and performing a close reading of batches of wells in given fields. We are also excited about exploring the benefits to the geothermal industry. What are their pain points and how can we customize our existing reports to tailor towards geothermal applications? A great cloud-based software system should always be evolving and never be finished which is what our team of programmers is prepared to do for this coming year.

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