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client success stories
Saving millions by avoiding expensive downtime for hydraulic fracturing equipment
3 min read
Oil & Gas
End-to-end software development and testing
Shale oil and gas have become an increasingly important energy source, especially in the United States. To extract shale oil and gas, specialized equipment that can withstand immense pressure is necessary to fracture rock miles below the surface of the earth; this process is called hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking). But to do this efficiently, users must be aware of when their equipment is due for maintenance. If the equipment stops working while in the well, millions of dollars are lost due to costly downtime and expensive logistics related to delivering replacement equipment to the field.
Additionally, the market for oil and gas extraction equipment is highly competitive. Our client, a major oilfield service company, needed a way to make their product stand out to increase equipment sales. To achieve this, they wanted to start providing oil and gas software solutions that support their equipment. Being an equipment-focused company, our client understood what kinds of software services were needed but did not know how to develop and deliver software in the cloud.
Bringing on industry and technology experts and using an Agile methodology, Luxoft developed an end-to-end hydraulic fracturing hardware controls and automation software suite, with the minimum viable product delivered in under four months. This project included IoT architecture development, cloud architecture development, data gathering and visualization development, manual and automated testing, and ongoing support for the hydraulic fracturing software.
Using IoT, big data collection and analysis, cloud and predictive maintenance technology, this solution monitors each time the fracking equipment is being used, determining if it’s in good working order or not long before the equipment is on the verge of breaking down. When the softwareś detects abnormal parameters or determines it’s time for scheduled maintenance, users automatically receive a preemptive alert with suggestions on the next steps. This predictive maintenance solution, paired with hydraulic fracturing equipment, has made monumental changes.
In oil and gas, you drill a well, build facilities and connect the well to those facilities. But by connecting machines together through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we can obtain invaluable insights, allowing us to make incremental changes that create monuśmental impacts.
Luxoft’s cloud infrastructure solution helps:
