Oil and Gas
From Paper Tickets to a Single Source of Truth
How SEQTEK digitized Taurex's field ticketing, and won over the skeptics who resisted it.
The problem
Every drill bit Taurex sends into the field starts with a ticket. For years that ticket was a piece of paper. It got carried to a rig, filled out by hand, and often lost, or scanned and emailed back and forth until someone could piece the story together. Accounting might get updated. Inventory rarely did, because nothing connected the two. The result was a company that couldn't reliably say what it had, where it was, or whether it had been billed.
Everyone at Taurex knew a real e-ticketing system would fix this, and everyone knew it was enormous, so it kept getting put off. It was the project people talked about but never took on.
The reason it was hard is the reason it mattered. Taurex doesn't sell one way. It sells and rents, in matrix and steel, at home and internationally. A bit might be billed before it runs or after. A damaged bit might be charged at the wellsite or back at the shop. One customer wants every bit on a single invoice, the next wants them split. Bits get dropped at one well and picked up at another. A system that only handled the clean cases would be useless. The whole point was to support everything the field actually does, without making it any harder to sell or rent a bit.
The solution
So SEQTEK started by listening. No single person understood the entire picture. The real rules lived scattered across dozens of sales reps, accountants, and district managers, each with their own hard-won workflow. Getting to one system that worked for all of them meant pulling that knowledge out, through demos, mockups, diagrams, and a lot of patient sessions, and reconciling the contradictions into something coherent.
The system that emerged made BitOps inventory the source of truth for the first time. A ticket now moves cleanly from the field to inventory to accounting: create it, scan the bits onto it, bill it the way the customer needs, and let it flow straight through to invoicing. When a bit comes back, its condition drives its inventory status automatically and routes the dull ones into repair.
The skeptics were the real test. Plenty of the field resisted the extra data entry, the way people resist any change to a working habit. What turned them was seeing what it bought them. Sales reps got their commissions faster. And for the first time, everyone from accounting to operations to district managers could see their own inventory: where each bit was, how it was being used, what state it was in, and how it was performing. That visibility simply hadn't existed before, and once people had it, they didn't want to give it back.
The impact
The payoff went further than billing. Because run details are now captured at the moment of the ticket, the performance data that used to evaporate on paper, how each bit ran, in which formation, for how long, now flows into the analytics that shape the next generation of designs. Digitizing the ticket turned the field into a data source.