Time Tracking for the Energy Sector

Cost Allocation and Budget Control

Your business is highly labor intensive, and you need to track billable vs non-billable hours, contract costs, and capital vs. operational expenditures. Here’s how time tracking helps with cost allocation and budget control:

Allocate labor costs to specific projects, clients, or asset types (e.g., pipeline inspections, corrosion monitoring, hydro testing)
Track whether labor costs should be expensed or capitalized, aligning with GAAP, IFRS, and USofA accounting rules
Capture detailed labor costs by job/activity/location, including overtime and other exceptions pay
Support budget forecasting by analyzing historical time data for AIM-related work

Regulatory Compliance and Audits

Time tracking can help you confirm workforce utilization compliance for the regulatory bodies you need to report to.

Provide real-time documentation of detailed labor activities, supporting compliance for inspection and maintenance schedules
Easily customize audit-ready reports linking your workforce to regulatory-mandated activities (e.g. pipeline lead detection surveys, refinery shutdown maintenance, etc.)
Help you pass compliance audits faster by showing records of who performed inspections and when those inspections were performed
Ensure that employees are tracking time (e.g., accruing overtime, taking required breaks) to help you comply with state and local wage laws

Contractor and Field Workforce Management

Workers in the field, whether full-time employees or specialized contractors, have special requirements to make sure they are able to track time easily and accurately across far-flung job sites.

Track time from any location with robust mobile apps to capture job start/stop, location, equipment involved, related expenses, etc.
Use mobile devices to capture supporting evidence (e.g., documents, pictures, notes) for work completed
Validate time entry for specific job sites/ locations or individual jobs based on location (e.g. create geo-fences for a worker’s job site locations)
Manage jobs and work orders as they are created and assigned to workers, all while tying them back to project cost accounting for financial reporting and billing

Workforce Optimization and Productivity

With the multi-disciplinary teams required to perform asset integrity management (engineers, technicians, inspectors), you need the ability to assign work effectively to reduce inefficiencies and downtime, all while working far-afield from other resources on the project. A good time tracking system will allow you to:

Track workforce utilization rates to help you identify bottlenecks and idle time for your team members
Provide shift scheduling and overtime tracking, preventing AIM-related delays due to resource shortages
Support wage law compliance by location including changes in jurisdiction depending upon where the work is done
Help you compare time spent on planned vs unplanned maintenance to improve process efficiency

Risk Management and Incident Response

Your asset integrity management teams help you prevent catastrophic failures, whether pipeline leaks, outages, refinery explosions, etc. In the case of an incident, however, you need to provide a detailed timeline of AIM-related work efforts for legal, insurance, and regulatory investigation purposes. Implementing a robust time tracking system allows you to:

Easily and quickly document who was working on a specific asset before an incident occurred, aiding in forensic investigations
Provide evidence of compliance with safety protocols to reduce your liability in post-incident legal cases
Provide a historical log of workforce activities to support root cause analysis and mitigate future risks