Oil and Gas Fleet Management for Remote Field Vehicles

Operators and oilfield service companies in Egypt’s Western Desert, the Gulf of Suez, Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province and across the Gulf share the same fleet problems:

• Remote routes. A vehicle may drive hundreds of kilometres on desert tracks to reach a rig or camp. A failure out there puts the crew at risk and can take a day to recover.
• Strict checks before every journey. Most operators require a documented vehicle check before a vehicle is allowed to leave base, and supervisors need to know it was actually done.
• Heavy-duty operation. Heat, sand, corrugated tracks and full loads push vehicles into the manufacturer’s severe-duty category.
• Audits and incident reviews. After an incident, the first questions are about the vehicle: when was it last serviced, when was it last inspected, and what was found.

Desert operation usually means following the manufacturer’s severe-duty schedule: shorter oil and air filter intervals, and more frequent checks of brakes, suspension, cooling and tyres. Using the normal schedule is one of the most common reasons field vehicles break down.

In Axpense you set each interval in kilometres, per vehicle. The system shows kilometres left to each service and lists the vehicles that are overdue, so a supervisor can hold back a vehicle that should not go out on a long trip. Each completed service stays in the vehicle’s history. Filters, tyres and other parts fitted in the field can be recorded through spare parts, so you can see what went into which vehicle. Read more on our fleet maintenance software page.

Field vehicles are expensive to run and their costs are often spread across contracts and cost centres. Axpense records repairs, parts, tyres, insurance, registration and other costs per vehicle and category, so you can see the total for each vehicle and compare vehicles doing similar work.

For example, if two identical pickups on similar routes show very different repair totals over a year, that difference points to something worth checking: driving style, a recurring fault or a vehicle past its economic life. Depreciation in vehicle lifecycle management adds book value to that comparison, and fleet cost tracking explains the cost reports.

Consider a hypothetical oilfield service company with 30 4x4 pickups, 8 crew buses, 7 water tankers and 5 service trucks working across several desert sites. Pre-trip checks are paper forms kept at each camp; services are booked when a driver says the vehicle is due.

The fleet team registers all 50 vehicles in Axpense, sets severe-duty intervals and builds a pre-trip checklist from the company’s journey management procedure. Supervisors start checking the overdue list before approving long trips, and failed items such as a worn spare tyre or a missing extinguisher are recorded on the vehicle instead of on a loose form.

When the operator asks for a vehicle’s service and inspection history during a site audit, the team opens that vehicle’s record rather than searching camp files.