Ryan Holcomb, a career petroleum engineer and now President of Pantechs Labs, was able to save his team dozens of hours per week in their petrochemical testing processes with a handful of AppSheet apps he built himself - without learning to code! Here’s the story of the No-Code transformation.
As an engineer, Ryan was asking the question that you’re probably pondering right now: “How can I optimize these workflows that are running on spreadsheets and paper forms?” He quickly landed on AppSheet as a possible solution. In just a few days he was able to get a couple prototype apps running on data he had in Smartsheet & Google Sheets. The intuitive development environment helped him craft effective user interfaces without the need to employ an app or graphic designer. Critical features like offline stability were perfect to build data capture apps for chemical sample collection in remote oil field locations.
In a few months, Ryan took several field service and internal operational processes to new levels of efficiency by building AppSheet applications to manage the workflow. His apps were used for collecting data in the field, managing testing and reporting processes internally, and generating automated PDF reports for his customers.
Here are some key AppSheet features and strategies that Ryan used:
The AppSheet Training (QREW Tech) team had the pleasure of working with Ryan to learn AppSheet best practices and properly setup his MySQL database to optimize his applications. He was able to put the apps together quickly, and confidently manage the functioning of the apps himself when it was all said and done.
One major component to tying this all together was unifying the data from field sampling all the way to result reporting. With dozens of different chemicals & testing products they offered, as well as a multi-step testing process, organizing the master database was no small task. Hiring an outside firm to do this would have been super expensive and inefficient because they never could have understood all the ins & outs of the process like Ryan did.
With a little coaching on database best practices and basic SQL, Ryan was able to construct a database schema that fit his business processes to a “T”. Now every critical business function had a data footprint and was stored in one location. Reporting and Analysis capabilities that were previously impossible were now at his fingertips.
Unified process data now allowed Ryan to plan how to automate tedious & repetitive tasks his team was performing. One key area was a chemical testing report which was his main deliverable to customers.
This creation of these extensive reports required the lion-share of one employee’s time. They would have to parse through handwritten data and import/export testing data into complex spreadsheets, ultimately collating into one master document.
Using AppSheet’s powerful Document Generation features, Ryan built a PDF generation pipeline that took test results in his database and fully automated the creation of a 20+ page document at the press of a button! No he could redirect that employees valuable time into better functions of the business.
All in all, he was able to save dozens of man hours per week and make his company more competitive in the oil & gas industry. AppSheet gave him the tools and agility to run an automated system that companies 10x bigger than Pantechs would be jealous of.
Do you want to see how AppSheet apps can transform your operations? Our team of platform experts and educators are here for you!
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