5 Mins With ... Travis Parigi, CEO of LiquidFrameworks

ServiceMax, a leader in asset-centric field service management, has bought LiquidFrameworks, the mobile field operations management solutions company, specialising in the energy industry, from Luminate Capital Partners, a private equity firm. The acquisition enables ServiceMax to expand its field service management solutions to meet the unique challenges of the energy sector. Travis Parigi, CEO of LiquidFrameworks, reflects on the mutual benefits from the deal and how oilfield service providers can transform their legacy field operations management processes to digital systems

Briefly outline how the LiquidFrameworks acquisition benefits both companies?

Both companies are focused on providing solutions to a common business problem, field service management for enterprise organisations, using a common technology platform, Salesforce. There are rich opportunities across both companies to leverage people, knowledge and many years of domain and technical expertise that will undoubtedly benefit the combined product suite.

LiquidFrameworks will continue to support its customers through this combination with ServiceMax, further extending its competitive differentiation across the field service management landscape. On the other hand, this acquisition will better position ServiceMax to meet the demand for digital service execution in this industry while expanding its product portfolio and go-to-market channels.

How can oilfield service providers transform their legacy field operations management processes to digital systems?

Moving from legacy, paper-based systems often siloed in various departments to a digital process can be done in phases across one or more product lines on a location-by-location basis.  We find that companies achieve the best results by leveraging the FieldFX product suite as the platform to deliver the most domain-specific functionality to their user base as quickly as possible yielding high ROI through increased cash flow, revenue recapture, invoice accuracy and labor reduction. 

Companies often start by modeling the complexities and mechanics of their global price books and customer-specific price books using the FieldFX CPQ engine. As the foundation for all transactions the Price Books are used throughout the logical next steps of rolling out digital processes for Quoting, Scheduling, Ticketing, Timecards and Invoicing. Asset Management plays an important role as a common thread found throughout all of the modules and processes.

Field Technicians are responsible for delivering service to the customer along with operating new digital systems - anything more specific, which systems or new technologies (eg AI/ML) should they be targeting?

In the oil and gas industry the field technician or field engineer is responsible for leading the crew that delivers the service such as an open hole wireline job or a casing job or a pressure pumping service performed on location for the customer at the well site in the case of the upstream oil and gas industry.
In the case of the downstream industry, the service might be a hydro-blasting job to clean a heat exchanger at a refinery. 

In either case, the field engineer must safely and effectively complete the complex and often times dangerous service for the customer during which time they must also complete various business process to track the work being executed in order that the back office can accurately invoice for the service. The FieldFX Mobile product from LiquidFrameworks enables the field engineer to track the required information for both operational data and financial data in a manner that is fast, effective and easy. 

Does the post-COVID landscape provide a new start for digital field service management? What should be companies' immediate priorities?

With the recent layoffs and the workforce getting younger, the oil and gas industry is at the cusp of transformation. The oil and gas industry has been slowly digitising for many years now, but with the pandemic, this push has accelerated a pivot and implemented new ways of working.

When it comes implementing digital field service management, companies need to have a vision of totality across the organisation but be nimble and agile about taking bite-size chunks to effect change – take the highest return on investment items and divide them up and down into the service line and geography level – for the highest probability of success.