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Liberty Oilfield Services is a premier hydraulic fracturing services company with locations across the US.
Solution 1:
Pen and paper
Result: Wasted time sorting through papers to try and find solutions and answers
Solution 2:
CMMS #1
Result: Interface was not intuitive for mechanics to use. Analytics were lacking.
Solution 3:
Fiix
Result: A user-friendly solution. “[It] feels like having an ‘easy’ button.”
When Liberty Oilfield Services US Maintenance Manager Jack Featheringill started googling “maintenance software” in 2017, he knew exactly what he was looking for: something entirely different than the CMMS he had just cut ties with. While the first CMMS his team worked with allowed them to move away from the pen-and-paper based work order system they had outgrown some time ago, it had also introduced a host of other problems.
“It wasn’t structured for mechanics or shop work,” Jack explained to Fiix. “It was tracking parts costs just fine, but it wasn’t telling the whole story that we needed to know. If a customer wanted records, we couldn’t tell them anything beyond, ‘Well, we charged four filters to that unit.’ That’s just a fraction of what really happened. There was no failure analysis, no context, no insurance for our mechanics.”
Worse still, the system was nearly impossible to use. “It was just multiple clicks. Click, click, click, click… you’d get lost in it. There’s no way the mechanics were going to spend that much time trying to input the information that would have been of any use.”
Parts Manager Joe Netherland adds that the final straw came when he was asked to provide a review of his experience with the CMMS. “Evidently, I told the truth and they didn’t like that too much. When I turned in my review, they told me to pull it or they wouldn’t give us any more support.”
[The first CMMS we used] wasn’t structured for mechanics or shop work. It was tracking parts costs just fine, but it wasn’t telling the whole story that we needed to know.
Jack Featheringill, US Maintenance Manager
Liberty Oilfield Services
Though Jack had one soured CMMS experience behind him, he decided to use it as fuel to find a better alternative. “I probably spent about three or four weeks just looking at different systems,” he explained.
“I knew right out of the gate that whatever we went with had to be easy to use, since that’s what we were missing before. The other thing was finding something that could capture all that information that we were missing, where I didn’t have to sit at a filing cabinet and thumb through hundreds of handwritten papers just trying to understand what was happening.”
From the beginning, Fiix stood out as a frontrunner as the only option that allowed Jack to try a demo version right away. “Every other company wanted me to enter in a bunch of information, which I did a time or two, but then the phone just started ringing off the hook. I appreciated that with Fiix, I could actually take the time to play around with it a bit and see if this was something I liked before I decided to talk to anyone.”
I knew right out of the gate that whatever we went with had to be easy to use, since that’s what we were missing before. The other thing was finding something that could capture all that information that we were missing.
Testing the system himself made it easy for Jack to confirm that Fiix could provide an easy-to-use, data-centric CMMS solution, but now it was time to present the software to his team. “I wanted it to be a group decision. My technicians, my maintenance managers, the parts department, all those folks were going to be the ones using it all day long, so I wanted to give everyone their chance to decide if it would work for them.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t a hard sell. “There was just so much chaos that we went through prior to this. Everyone knew this was going to make their lives easier.”
Once they came to a group consensus, they got to work implementing the system. As Jack describes it, many of the features he needed came “right out of the box”, but he was glad that Fiix was able to provide some customized features as well, including a custom widget, customized workflows, and status changes that made sense for them.
Though Jack expected a dramatic improvement over the last CMMS, he was shocked by how quickly Fiix provided the insight he needed. “We saw right away where the gaps were,” he told Fiix. Now those insights are part of his day-to-day. “The dashboard is number one in my world,” he says. “I love just having a quick overview of what’s going on in each district, what’s going on company-wide.”
The immediate benefits extended to parts and supplies as well. As Joe Netherland explains, before Fiix, there were massive amounts of missing inventory that resulted in huge quarterly spends that couldn’t be accounted for. Fiix provided an immediate solution for this, giving an opportunity for every part used to be documented. “Now, these quarterly inventories are non-events,” remarks Joe. “Our CFO just told us that the dollar figure is now so small that it’s nothing to worry about.”
The dashboard is number one in my world. I love just having a quick overview of what’s going on in each district, what’s going on company-wide.
Though the team at Liberty Oilfield Services continues to grow quickly, with over 400 employees now using Fiix across all districts, no one is worried about outgrowing the solution. “Having this system in place is a huge relief,” says Jack. “It’s a hundred and ten percent better than what we were using before, and it’s good to know that we’re finally headed in the right direction.” As for parts and supplies, Joe echoes the same sentiments. “Having Fiix feels like having an ‘easy’ button. The guys in my world love it.”
Having Fiix feels like having an ‘easy’ button. The guys in my world love it.
Joe Netherland, Parts Manager
The best way to get to know Fiix maintenance management software is to get your hands on the actual product. Go ahead. Take it for a spin.