PDM_Lean_Blog

     A fter years in the making, a new fully automated drilling rig recently made its debut in Permian Basin. While this has long been a pipedream, restrictions faced by many oil and gas companies during the pandemic forced several to stop operations and call rig workers home. This spurred a plethora of tech companies to establish partnerships with oil giants to help automate systems and digitalize operations so that projects could run with or without human workers, through innovations like robot rigs.        In October, Houston company Nabors Industries achieved drilling to a depth of almost 20,000 feet with its automated rig, with no help from a crew on the floor to run operations manually. The company is expected two dig three wells in the area as part of its test phase. The Nabors Pace-R801 is the world’s first fully automated land rig, taking five years of engineering to achieve. It supports ExxonMobil operations in the region, providing unmanned ...

Lean manufacturing, when done right, can improve productivity and reduce waste on the plant floor. Successful implementation requires buy-in from workers. See three ways to change workers’ perception of Lean and build trust. Lean manufacturing wasn’t always a widely-adopted model used by production floor personnel. In 1996,  James Womack and Daniel Jones wrote a book titled,  Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation , which introduced the five principles of Lean – value, the value stream, flow, pull and perfection. These principles created the foundation for Lean manufacturing that can minimize waste and improve productivity. Why did Lean manufacturing struggle to gain traction? While many agree today Lean manufacturing is valuable, it suffered from one common and problematic misconception when first introduced – the elimination of waste correlating to the elimination of jobs. The truth is, when done right, Lean manufacturing does the exact opposite – ...