The oil and gas industry faces numerous challenges, including global demand fluctuations, price volatility, political and economic uncertainties, supply chain pressures, tight margins, and stringent regulations. Outdated manual processes further exacerbate these issues, prompting the adoption of cost-saving technologies like mobile barcoding.

Managing inventory and high-value assets across vast geographical locations, particularly in remote areas is particularly challenging. Real-time tracking solutions are essential to avoid financial losses and maintain competitiveness. Despite this, many companies still rely on inefficient manual methods, such as handwritten slips and spreadsheets, which lack transparency and visibility, leading to lost inventory and costly downtime. Businesses can effectively address challenges by using real-time mobile inventory solutions that provide accurate, up-to-date visibility into inventory movements, stock levels, locations, and consumption, even in remote areas without live network connectivity.

Especially in the oil and gas industry, technologies like mobile barcoding can significantly improve materials management as these provide real-time control and transparency, enhance safety, promote sustainability, and achieve substantial cost savings. Mobile barcoding integrates enterprise mobility with automated barcoding, enabling real-time data collection and ERP transactions using mobile devices. Especially in remote environments, RFgen's casually connected mode allows workers to continue operations regardless of Wi-Fi or cellular connectivity. RFgen enhances material visibility beyond Wi-Fi network range by utilizing advanced mobile data collection solutions that function offline, facilitating uninterrupted operations in remote environments such as fields, oil platforms, or large yards. Collected data is queued for immediate transfer upon reconnection, ensuring continuous and reliable ERP data exchange. The seamless integration with major ERP systems ensures accurate and timely reflection of remote data in the ERP, thereby maintaining comprehensive material visibility across the supply chain.

Losing track of assets incurs substantial costs, negatively affecting financial performance and operational efficiency through significant financial losses and production disruptions. Asset tracking is essential to ensure availability for maintenance and production, reducing downtime and enhancing productivity, while preventing unauthorized use or theft and safeguarding investments. Effective asset management is crucial for maintaining optimal operations and minimizing mismanagement costs. RFgen’s mobile solutions enable enterprise-wide monitoring of asset location and condition, reducing losses, waste, and maintenance delays digitally. Through intelligent mobile automation and mobile barcoding inventory solutions, RFgen provides purpose-built, enterprise-optimized technology that seamlessly integrates with existing ERP environments. The advanced technology enhances asset tracking and performance with offline capabilities, eliminating manual processes, tracking assets and spare parts in real-time, and digitizing field inspections.

Case in Point

RFgen® enabled a global liquefied natural gas exporter to digitally transform manual inventory and MRO processes with mobile barcoding, accelerating materials management by 400%. After a merger, a Global LNG Exporter switched from IBM Maximo to SAP for materials management, losing barcoding functionality and reverting to paper processes for managing MRO spare parts inventory. Each material had two item numbers, one for Maximo and another for SAP, complicating operations as finding an item required knowing the SAP number and then translating it into the Maximo number to find it in the warehouse.

Recognizing the unsustainability of their current system, the company sought a new barcoding solution with seamless SAP integration. They chose RFgen Mobile Foundations for SAP, which uses mobile apps to mobilize inventory, offering real-time, bidirectional communication for up-to-the-second speed and accuracy while enhancing data security.

RFgen digitally transformed manual inventory processes with mobile barcoding, allowing the warehouse team to receive, issue, store, and pull items instantly at the point of scan, eliminating the need for paper notes and long commutes for data entry. This integration also removed the need for translating Maximo numbers to SAP.

The benefits included automated spare parts inventory management for MRO, improved inventory accuracy and labor utilization, a 400% speed increase in materials management, reduced operating costs from real-time visibility, and significantly shorter training times for new employees. RFgen's intuitive user interface reduces training time by 75-93%, enabling new workers to become fully productive in just one or two days instead of weeks, boosting overall productivity and positively impacting the bottom line.