The Quote To Cash project for Earth Drilling demonstrates Launchcode’s abilities to deliver end-to-end solutions for custom workflows and a variety of industries.  Earth Drilling undertook multiple drilling projects across various geographies. With several clients on their ledgers, multiple services and different contracts, the company officials had to juggle Excel sheets and manual quotations.

Launchcode developers not only created an efficient, easy-to-use quotation platform, that featured customizable rates, specifications and templates, but also apps for their in-field personnel to track real-time costs, equipment requirements, timesheets, jobs executed, safety protocols, etc.  The all-powerful tool could also generate invoices as and when the jobs were completed.  End to end. Quote to cash. A to Z. Promised and delivered.

Land drilling as an operation can be quite diverse, right from industries to solutions to goals. Oil and natural gas industries will have different needs than water well drilling, which will be different from geotechnical, environmental and geothermal drilling.  According to many reports, North America dominates the land rig market, even as Asia Pacific has emerged as the fastest growing market¹.  Earth Drilling as a contractor serves all these niches and consequently has a diverse set of clientele.  Add to that, a cumbersome and costly manual quotation and invoicing process using paperwork that dents the environment too. Passing on all those details from sales to operations to finance, further complicates the process besides creating "source of truth" issues.

Once quotations turn into jobs, keeping track of operational aspects (personnel, equipment, safety protocols) and financial factors (costs, margins, profitability) becomes important but most of the time, challenging.  Most off-the-shelf solutions do not fit custom workflows with each industry and company understandably different from the next.  While Excel and other spreadsheets are leaps and bounds ahead of their predecessors, scalability can be an issue as companies and operations grow.

Launchcode has always taken pride in trying to understand the fundamentals of a client's business before moving forward with building a solution. The approach is at the heart of what Launchcode does.  With Earth Drilling, multiple sprints focused on understanding the needs of the personnel that were to use the solution once implemented.  There was also the case of exporting data out of the old system, and into the new.  The need for custom rates and templates (service, equipment and client-focused) became evident. The team also worked on the ability to add custom fields that allowed adding of additional items to the estimates. The quotation process also underlined the need for a visually-appealing document for submission to the client.

Sprints then veered towards creating a bridge between sales and operations, and handing over accurate job-related information and requirements that would help the latter. That included automating a list of rigs and tools needed to complete a particular job according to the quotation and setting up schedules for personnel.  To ensure continuity and accuracy in operations, the in-field crew had access to all the information, besides being able to access safety protocols and timesheets.  The ability to create on-site work logs was yet another source of reliable operational data.