Don’t Boil the Ocean. Start with Routine Checklists.

Drilling contractors ask me where it is best to start with digital transformation. My answer is now always the same: start simple. 

Routine daily checklists are the highest-frequency instances of work on your site, generally done on paper, and the first place where execution "drift" occurs in day to day operations. 

THE PROBLEM

Imagine a situation where a Derrickman starts his shift at 0600 and walks into the toolpusher's office at 0800 with 47 items on their 'drilling fluids' checklist marked complete. The toolpusher takes a brief look: everything is filled in, all looks good on paper, and the Derrickman didn't report any issues. But below decks on mud pump #2, a main crankshaft bearing is running hotter than it should be. 

The Derrickman missed it because he's new to the rig and isn't familiar with the pump model, so is still learning which readings are good or bad. His back-to-back would have known, but he’s on rotation. The toolpusher would have known, but he doesn’t have time to check over every reading. The onshore superintendent knows, but the acceptance criteria lives in his head and not in the paper checklist he helped construct.

2 hours later the rollers break-up as the vibrations get stronger, the motor trips and drilling operations are paused. . Mud pump #1 is already down for maintenance, and pump #2 now needs to be urgently stripped, diagnosed and repaired. There’s no spares left onboard (they were being used on #1), and the quickest EXW bearing is 1 week away at best.  The company is now off day-rate and the operator is not happy! 

The NCR for this failure will probably attribute the root cause to competency, but that would not be correct. This was an execution process problem.  To add insult to injury, this execution process problem isn’t limited to just this rig - it exists across all their rigs! Looking at the potential failure risk now, we can  see how costly even the simplest process problem can become in our high stakes industry.

Forrester and SafetyCulture measured this cost in 2025: they identified a 37-point gap between how confident frontline workers are in their procedure adherence vs how consistently those procedures are actually executed as required by process. On the kind of assets where $500,000 per hour walks out the door the moment something goes wrong (Siemens, 2022), that gap should be something every Drilling Contractor takes seriously - especially when successful day-to-day operations rely on hundreds of these types of routine checklists.

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WHY THIS USE CASE.

There are six OG&E use cases where Atheer’s execution platform has demonstrated value - from remote expert support, to turnaround / SPS work orchestration, to full knowledge capture for future proofing purposes. 

THE SIX OG&E USE CASES

Use Case 02 is where most companies start — and where the value of transforming frontline work execution is demonstrated most simply.

The reason I recommend starting with routine ‘Inspection and Maintenance’ is not because it offers most value to customers, but because it is the most honest test.

It requires no rip-and-replace of existing systems. It does not need you to unsettle your IT department, or your Maximo team. It can be tested & proven on any mobile device (and ideally a device your crew members already carry). 

You digitise two existing paper checklists and run them in parallel with the old process for four weeks or so, then compare the deviations to your written, auditable processes.

Stena Drilling ran this test in a high-consequence offshore environment. The results showed zero deviation against their strict operational processes, which are authored by their onshore SMEs and audited by ISO.

The work to get there was not complicated: replace the clipboard with a guided workflow that captures a response and a photo at each step, flags any anomalies in real time, auto-validates responses for correctness, and feeds an audit-ready record back to supervisors. Construction of each guided workflow took less than 30 minutes for the customer champion to self-build.

An in-platform dashboard can then reflect weekly completion status and the respective readings, for easy viewing by leadership. 

This execution gap is now closed.

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HOW TO REPLICATE (A PRACTICAL FRAMEWORK)

WHAT CHANGES IN PRACTICE

In the example mentioned above, the Derrickman still does the checklist. That does not change. 

What changes is that: 

1. each step is verified by the system at time of completion, not reconstructed in the Toolpusher’s office. 
2. an anomaly triggers a notification or ticket automatically, not a note on a whiteboard that may or may not get actioned. 
3. the senior mechanic who is retiring next quarter can record a thirty-second video at the asset that explains what to watch for on that particular pump, at that particular ambient temperature, so the knowledge stays even when he leaves.

Thereafter, the productivity case follows. Drilling Contractors using digitised inspection workflows report significant reductions in rework, re-inspection, and near-miss / LTI events. 

But the productivity gain is secondary. The primary outcome is that leadership is no longer operating on trust because they are structurally disconnected from execution in the field.

That is what execution infrastructure does. It does not replace the experienced worker, but it makes the inexperienced one significantly less likely to miss what the experienced one would have caught.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Once the inspection and maintenance execution case is proven, the path to the other five use cases becomes fairly clear:

• Remote expert support connects your field crews to specialists without flying anyone in.
• Turnaround / SPS orchestration brings multi-work pack & contractor coordination under a single audit trail. 
• Safety and compliance workflows eliminate paper based JSAs, Toolbox Talks & escalations. 
• Predictive maintenance integrates condition monitoring & trend analysis with the daily checklist. 
• Knowledge capture preserves what the retiring workforce knows before it leaves.

All centralised into one intelligent work execution platform, augmented by AI, accessible on any device.

It’s important to note that the desire to apply these use cases to your business doesn’t require you to make an upfront decision on a critical adjustment to your digital tech stack. It only requires a conversation about one or two checklists in one department. 

And a four-week pilot can demonstrate the value that digitization of even the simplest day-to-day processes can bring. 

So if you feel like execution drift has caused - or could have the potential to cause - some large and expensive headaches for your organization, then what are you waiting for? The outcomes will validate the approach!

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