With the advent of COVID-19 and the price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, comes the added challenge for the global oil and gas industry to re-strategize. Needless to say, many would argue that the Albertan oil and gas industry was on ‘life support’ before these recent happenings, and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic has only compounded a very challenging and difficult situation.
At EZ Ops, we are gearing up to help and have since decided not to be a bystander but to get involved, join in the call-to-action and fight against COVID-19, and support the industry and government as much as our capacity would allow. In pursuant of this, we have retooled and repurposed our EZ Ops digital innovation software platform to offer the EZLite Module for FREE to oil and gas producers. EZLite is a user-friendly location-based communication tool that supports social distancing and allows oil and gas personnel to work remotely without any noticeable drop in efficiency or productivity. EZLite would be deployed remotely and allow producers:
- Continue to operate without scaling down activities or shutting in wells/operations.
- Reduce the need for face-to-face meetings
- Maintain alignment between Corporate and the field/plants to drive corporate business. initiatives without having to visit field locations.
- Communicate remotely while ensuring safety and compliance with regulatory agencies.
- Help team members multi-task and/or fill multiple roles, thus increasing their productivity.
- Operators to function effectively without physical in-person crossovers during cross shifts.
- Facilitate quick operator training thus, shorten competence training curves.
One of the features of EZLite is the Logbook that provides log entries of periodic activities and provides visibility for field, plant and corporate personnel (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1 – EZLogbookTM 
Fig. 2 – EZTaskTM
While the EZLogbook provides critical lagging indicators, the EZTask (Fig. 2) feature of EZLite provides leading indicators. This helps operators and foremen to drive and ensure accountability of what needs to be done, who and where it will be done to ensure productivity is maintained and safety and compliance are ensured. Our platform works offline in remote areas, tag in teams and management and allows for remote collaborative work – all traceable back to a location.
Our Developers, Customer Relations, Account Managers and Sales teams are working round the clock in reaching out to both existing and potential clients to intimate them with the need for this free offering. EZ OPs would require a much-needed financial support to keep the existing team together to continue to reach out and deploy the EZLite software remotely and be on hand to support oil and gas operators with training, troubleshooting and resolution of technical problems. This auditable EZLite Module has both online and offline capabilities and modeled to function on office workstation, tablets and smart phones without any added hazardous components to field operations. Fig. 3 depicts how EZLite can be displayed on any smartphone. Functionality is guaranteed, with and without cell and network coverage and particularly beneficial for operators in remote locations.
EZLite that has been reconfigured from the EZ Ops product suite to allows front line oil and gas workers to avoid face to face meetings while creating an auditable track record of events in any workflow. Should producers choose to, this software allows for up to a 20% reduction in staff while still ensuring that essential work is completed without any drop in productivity. We encourage producers to use EZLite and we are seeing more interest and traction that our current capacity can allow.
EZLite is a short to medium-term solution that could morph into a deployment of the full complement of EZ Ops business intelligence platform that has proven to provide a 1000% ROI for operators that have used it. Operators are coming to the realization that in the face of the current low oil and gas price and the need for physical distancing, EZLite (and/or EZ Ops) is the way to go to digitize their activities and provide them with ‘twin operations’. EZLIte is being offered for FREE with guaranteed adoption.
