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Key Energy Services - new business intelligence tool

Friday, December 9, 2011

Key Energy Services recently installed a major business intelligence tool, in response to complaints from clients that 'you don't have the right information to make decisions,' said John Hood, CIO of Key Energy Services, speaking at the Oracle Oil and Gas day in San Francisco in October 2011.

Key is a specialist in land-based well services, including fishing (retrieving objects stuck in the well), fluid management, rental services, rig services, intervention services and high pressure equipment.

Mr Hood sees a 5 step 'maturity scale' with how companies use business intelligence, when they get from now knowing about it at all, to considering the opportunities, to having a standardised approach to it, then an 'enterprise approach' to it, and finally when it transforms the company.

The company had made a lot of effort in its enterprise resource planning system. 'People thought they're going to get lots of good information because they put it in an ERP,' he said. 'Guess what, you don't.'

The company hired Hitachi Consulting, part of Japanese technology giant Hitachi, to implement its business intelligence system. 'When you pick BI apps you have to pick the right consulting firm,' he said.

Hitachi was good at encouraging the use of off the shelf solutions where that was practical. 'A lot of firms want to make money on BI by doing custom work. We decided there was no need in the world to customise a financial reporting package. Oracle has already built all that stuff.'

Secondly you need good master data. 'Just because you have an ERP system doesn't mean you have good master data,' he said.

Key uses various different systems to provide master data, including employee data and asset data.

With good master data management, it is easy to change around management reports when asked to.

When putting together a business intelligence system it is important to understand the different business 'rhythms', or how people in different roles operate on different time scales, although using the same data. 'Hitachi helped us understand that executives want to see things differently to others,' he says.

'Intervention services [staff] look at things by the job.'

The only thing which everybody sees in the same way is the 'safety component,' he said.

Hitachi also helped train Key's staff. 'If they left tomorrow we can stand on our own feet,' he said.

The master data is very important. 'I need to be able to manage data by district, by asset, by employee,' he said.

'I can see a day when we might use [master data directly] in investor relations presentations.'

One of Mr Hood's goals, he says, is to encourage district managers to make more use of the system. 'Now some of them say, 'I go in here every day'. It is very gratifying. It used to be that they were being bombarded by lots of different things, such as Excel spreadsheets. Now they have it all on the dashboard.'

Associated Companies
» Key Energy Services
» Oracle Corporation

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