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Maintenance and Inspection Apps for Oil Industry: Offshore Oil Platforms

Thomas Guth used Alpha Anywhere to create a mobile maintenance and inspection app, designed for tablets and smartphones that would allow workers on the oil platform to record maintenance and inspection information, and update the database via Wi-Fi.

Thomas Guth used Alpha Anywhere to create a mobile maintenance and inspection app, designed for tablets and smartphones that would allow workers on the oil platform to record maintenance and inspection information, and update the database via Wi-Fi.

Maintenance and Inspection apps for oil industry are critical in remote locations around the world.  Here’s one example of how Alpha Anywhere is helping build critical oil industry maintenance and inspection apps – this time for oil platform maintenance and inspection…

Tracking maintenance on and inspecting offshore oil platforms in the North Sea is vital to proper operations for major oil companies; but it’s tough to do, especially in the extreme weather and circumstances often found at sea. So when independent programmer and consultant Thomas Guth was approached by a major offshore drilling company to build a maintenance and inspection app, he knew he had avery important job to do.

The company, with platforms and ships in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, Middle East and Southeast Asia, is ranked in the top 3 of offshore drilling companies by Ranker.com. The oil Company needed help building a system for capturing and tracking maintenance and inspection of its facilities in the North Sea. Because of the extreme conditions in which the facilities operate, the company could not use standard data-capture software that relies on Internet connectivity.

The company was using an Excel spreadsheet to track daily maintenance activities, but that required a great deal of manual labor – maintenance staff had to write down the information on paper-and-clipboard while they were performing maintenance, then key the information into a computer. Not uncommonly, there were errors when data was input and delays in getting the information into systems of record.

Guth chose Alpha Anywhere to develop the maintenance and inspection app solution because of the ease with which it creates forms, its ability to write maintenance and inspection apps once and deploy it to multiple devices, and its ability to create tablet-based forms.

“Alpha Anywhere was ideal for me,” Guth said. “I needed to build an enterprise-class app that would work on both smartphones and tablets, that lets me create tablet-optimized forms, that takes a low-code approach to app creation, and that could take advantage of cameras built into phones and tablets.”

Guth first built a Microsoft Access database to put on the computer on the drilling platform, to store the maintenance and inspection information. He then used Alpha Anywhere to create a mobile maintenance and inspection app, designed for tablets and smartphones that would allow workers on the oil platform to record maintenance and inspection information, and update the database via Wi-Fi.

The maintenance and inspection app also allows workers to use tablets or smartphones to take photos of their maintenance work or inspection details, and works offline, even when not connected to a network. The photos are automatically date-stamped.

Benefits

Guth wrote the maintenance and inspection app in only four days. “I used Alpha Anywhere’s low-code approach to writing the app,” he explains. “The four days includes not just writing the app, but also testing and implementing it. I couldn’t have done that with any other tool.”

The offshore company has reaped significant benefits from the usage of maintenance and inspection apps. They realized faster time to market and much lower costs than other methods of development. In addition, the accuracy of their maintenance and inspection information has improved. Because the app captures photos of maintenance and inspection work, the company can send photos of equipment to vendors documenting the issues that were found, or showing parts that need to be ordered. The Company is now able to track failure rates in specific parts, and based on that perform maintenance more frequently on them.

“Alpha Anywhere did a great job for both me and for the offshore company,” Guth says. “I was able to build the app quickly, and they’ve gotten significant benefits from it.”

To view other Alpha Anywhere maintenance and inspection apps visit our App Gallery.

To read more about how to build oil industry maintenance and inspection apps, read the full case study: Alpha Anywhere Helps Build Maintenance and Inspection App for Offshore Oil Platforms.

Interested in maintenance and inspection apps for other industries? Read more about field inspection appsconstruction inspection apps, home inspection apps and health and safety inspection apps.


Alpha Solutions for Oil and Gas

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Safety Inspections  •  Pipeline Inspections  •  Gemba Walks  •  Platform Audits  •  Certifications and Training    
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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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