DistributionNOW: Survey & asset management

THE CHALLENGE

Tapping into business augmentation through VentureDive’s mobile app & web development services

DistributionNOW (DNOW) is the leading supplier to energy and industrial markets worldwide, delivering a complete range of products and services to upstream, midstream, downstream and industrial customers. DNOW required a platform where they could easily organize their data, curate surveys for their field engineers and generate comprehensive asset management reports. The result is a well-rounded and complete supply-chain solution. Being a major supplier of valves, flanges and other parts to corporations in the Oil and Gas Sector, DNOW ensures that there is no breakdown of its clients’ operations by having these parts go through different life cycles and periodic maintenance checks. The company maintains a complete set of records so this entire process runs smoothly, and no part goes missing. 

Before DNOW approached VentureDive, they were using physical sheets, paper-based registers and/or Excel sheets for maintaining records – a laborious manual process that could be subject to errors and data integrity issues. This also severely limited the scalability of their maintenance services.

In a rapidly expanding marketplace, DNOW needed an efficient, sustainable, and scalable solution for their record maintenance. They envisioned a platform where they could easily organize their data, curate surveys for their field engineers and generate comprehensive asset management reports.

DNOW was looking to…

• Streamline asset management
• Create simple & immersive user journeys
• Build an intuitive reporting mechanism
• Digitize asset repair processes
• Maintain data integrity
• Automate spreadsheet-based management

THE SOLUTION

Creating immaculate customer journeys and a solid platform with design, consulting and data services

DNOW and VentureDive collaborated to develop a mobile application to create QR associated digital surveys that field engineers could use in the field. The application allowed for efficiency, scalability and data integrity by syncing data from multiple engineers, even if they were in remote offline locations, into a central hub. The centralization of the data allows DNOW to have effective reporting and an overview of all of its assets in the field and their respective life cycles. By streamlining its asset management process, DNOW can further improve not only their operations but also improve their users’ journey.

The solution is created to address the data-heavy and intense process of the oil and gas industry. Site surveys are required for oil rigs, and they were previously done using a pen and paper. Later, this data is manually added to Excel sheets, which would then be managed on a computer manually. All of this process is digitized through the solution, along with numerous other business-critical features.

The development team at VentureDive built a web portal, where DNOW’s customers can upload the excel files for site surveys. Each record is populated in the portal, making it very easy for DNOW to keep a track of the number of valves and flanges for each oil rig. It also tells them which oil rig requires repair or replacement of faulty parts. 

The Web Portal and Android Mobile App were built for DNOW using cloud-based software infrastructure, AWS framework, and React MVVM architecture, as recommended by Google. AWS is used for infrastructure with containerized deployment, while React and Android are used for the web and mobile app development.

Along the journey, DNOW’s goals evolved from merely digitizing the survey and asset management processes, to making user journeys simple yet immersive. They wanted their customer engagement to go up, along with automating the tasks which had previously been carried out manually. This caused the scope of the project to expand substantially. 

To make it easier for customers, a dashboard was included within the web portal, as well as the mobile application. The dashboard allowed the customer to view a comprehensive summary/report of all the assets in circulation. DNOW could now upload the data from the surveys to the portal, perform a gap analysis and present it on the dashboard to have a clear picture of the situation.

THE RESULTS

Streamlined survey & asset management

DNOW’s upgrade to a fully automated platform reduced survey time significantly, going from hours to minutes. The future vision of DNOW is to now use the platform to generate revenue with a SAAS (Software-as-a-service) model.