"Combat Loading" a warehouse

If you could (and some of you can) run a report showing the top 50 items issued out of the rig warehouse what would you likely find? Tool dies, mud pump rubber goods, main engine filters and subsea repair kits? I can honestly say over 10 years I have issued more of those items out than anything else. Have these been kept close at hand to the front door of the warehouse or the office? Not once.

Other countries may have learned this lesson earlier but it appears from my research that the US military decided around the early 1940's that cargo vessels replenishing combat troops needed to be packed in a way that the most important cargo was unloaded first. Primarily this would have been ammunition, followed by food and other not items not deemed vital to the mission at hand.

Now luckily for most of us the oilfield is not a combat zone, however situations do arise where the stakes are life and death. It does not take much digging to find information on accidents on board drilling units where a failure of a component caused death or serious injury so when something needs to be repaired or replaced we in the materials department need to be prepared to react quickly.

Most rigs have been set up similarly to your local grocery store, there is a section for air compressors, main engines, subsea equipment, mud pumps and so on. How these are laid out in the available warehouse space is usually assigned by your companies numerical coding of equipment categories. This would have been set up when the rig was built and as time goes on more parts are shoehorned in or tacked on elsewhere. From personal experience not a lot of thought is put into how often certain items are going to be required and how easy they are to get to. A recent rig I was on had mud pump consumables (swabs, valves, seats) in a seperate locked warehouse across the hall from the main warehouse and office. This other warehouse also held all the tool dies for the drilling equipment and a climate controlled, darkened space for rubber goods. Main engine filters were kept in a lock up 4 levels down the column from the main warehouse and on the opposite side of the rig from the main engines. As such most parts issued in a day required leaving the main warehouse and either travelling down the column or unlocking another seperate warehouse.

Now if you wanted parts to repair the toaster in the galley or the water filter in the break room they were right there in the main warehouse attached to the office. How often has the galley toaster shut the rig down though or injured someone?

Sadly the complete reorganisation of a rig inventory is a major task that most storekeepers simply do not have the time to do during normal operations so this needs to be addressed either at the new build stage or in a lay up period, which many a rig has recently had or is currently experiencing. Even a small change of moving the top 20 issued items to the front row of your main warehouse will save hours a week and days over the year, allowing more time to ensure inventory accuracy keep your rig from that dreaded downtime.