CORE Linepipe
CORE Linepipe is an oil and gas pipeline manufacturing and service company in Alberta, Canada, that sells to and services customers in both Canada and the United States. CORE offers a robust and versatile, corrosion resistant pipeline with pre-installed liners and coating along with an engineered mechanical joint that provides more consistency and reliability than the traditional welding approach. CORE has installed over 700 kilometers of pipe to date for their customers with zero in-service failures.
THE NEED FOR EFFICIENCY TO GROW AND SCALE
As with many organizations, CORE started out with managing all of their work and data in spreadsheets. As the company grew, the spreadsheets grew and became fraught with issues as it lacked auditability and controls, and as complex formulas inadvertently break because of inconsistent input due to multiple people editing the same spreadsheets. When it came time to invoicing, it required hours of manual review on each ticket on the spreadsheet to ensure accuracy. To scale and continue to achieve the continued growth CORE was experiencing, a data management system needed to be implemented that can streamline the sales to invoicing process, eliminate or reduce errors, and provide quick access to data to enable CORE to maintain a high level of customer service that they are committed to providing to their customers.
A Rocky Beginning
In 2019, CORE began their evaluation of field ticketing solutions. Brian Peters, CORE’s Chief Financial Officer, has had a handful of unsuccessful experiences implementing Spira at previous companies and looked hard to find an alternative to Spira. Brian recounts on his experience.
“In past experience, Spira would overpromise and then underdeliver; the focus was on sales and promotion rather than delivering a quality product. But at the end of the day, Spira has a proven product that is stable and more fully featured than their competitors—we had to give them a chance. To my surprise, this time, sales did not oversell. They took the effort to assess and understand our needs and was upfront and transparent about the capabilities of the software.”
Foundation to a Successful Project
By being transparent with the software capabilities and limitations, expectations were level-set from the beginning. In addition, Brian was able to leverage his previous experiences to ensure past mistakes were not repeated. To achieve buy-in and accountability, stakeholders from all impacted departments (sales, field operations, finance, accounting) were brought into the software evaluation process and owned their requirements. Super users were identified and partnered with the Spira team to build out a solution that met the business needs of the organization. The Spira team provided a high level of support throughout the project and post implementation.
Tackling Unique Challenges
CORE’s biggest challenge was managing their fusing data which other software vendors were not able to address. For quality control, it is vital that they know where every stick of pipe is in the ground, ensuring all the appropriate tests are completed during installation and results captured. With Spira, they have configured and use fusing tickets to gain 100% traceability by tracking serialized consumption—with controls in place to ensure consistency and accuracy.
Reducing Time from Sales to Invoice
With Spira Data, CORE has reduced their time from Sales to Invoice. By leveraging Spira and the price book feature, CORE can generate accurate quotes directly out of the system. The time for Field Operations to complete their field tickets has reduced from one hour to within fifteen minutes—and with increased accuracy through the use of price books and system configured controls. Daily Operations Report used to take many hours to compile, now it takes a couple of minutes to generate. Personnel hours on location billed to the customer can be quickly reconciled with payroll hours via auto-generated exception reports. Tickets are routed through an automated review and approval workflow which eliminates the need for manual review of every individual ticket ready for invoicing. A Spira super user, Melissa Baugh, Field Operations Coordinator, comments on her experience and what she would like to achieve next.
“With Spira, everything has improved drastically, processes are exponentially better—more streamlined while providing better data consistency and accuracy. There used to be a lot of data changing hands which resulted in missing or lost data, but with Spira, that risk is eliminated. Now that the company is fully operational and comfortable on Spira, we plan on looking to utilize the system even more for reporting and data analytics.”
Conclusion
With Spira, CORE gets direct insight into sales activities, jobs performed, and achieves 100% traceability on their pipe consumption. All of their data is now consistent, accurate and stored within a single system with supporting documentation. This higher level of data integrity and accessibility enables them to optimize services like never before and empowers management to make better decisions, invoice faster with fewer errors, and streamline their field operations processes. CORE has doubled in size year over year since 2020 and has no plans to slow down. Spira has provided CORE with a toolset to manage sales and field operations in a way that will support their continued growth as a company.
