Santos has saved days of administrative time by incorporating Drawboard PDF into a company-wide digital transformation initiative. On-site workers markup PDF’s with touch and pen devices, to streamline reporting and information transfer back to head office.

Santos is an Australian energy pioneer who has safely and sustainably discovered, developed and delivered natural gas to the people of Australia and Asia for more than 60 years.

As an Australian owned and operated business, Santos works in partnership with local communities, governments and their business partners to make natural gas an affordable and reliable energy solution for all Australians.

“Anyone who’s been in industry for a long time enjoys the competition, enjoys the desire to be the best. We like to partner with people who want to be the best, and we want to provide the best solutions for our people. Drawboard PDF is just part of a natural excitement we have in our business.” 
David Ross, General Manager - Technical

The problem

“A few years back Santos noticed that they were starting to fall behind the ball with keeping up with the digital age” explains Alex Marschall, Integrity and Reliability Strategy Engineer. 

This meant that the Santos team were being limited in how quickly they could proving information to their team, and therefore complete projects as David Ross tells us. 

“If we were relying on getting a piece of paper to instruct our team in the field what to do, that piece of paper could be up to a month or 6 weeks old.” 

The Santos team were still very reliant on the use of paper throughout the business. This meant that paperwork was being sent out to work sites to be completed, before being returned to head office at which point it would be scanned and uploaded to their digital systems, making the day to day management of operations challenging. 

A solution that lets us move faster

“When I first picked up Drawboard PDF I was impressed with how seamlessly it worked with our touch devices. The radial menu provides us with all the functionality that we needed, and the annotations were easy to see, and use, with little or no training.” 

The Santos team now uses Drawboard PDF to fill in any paperwork that they were previously doing on paper. They can do this digitally, and upload to share with the engineering department back in head office so they get that instant feedback - which means they are saving hours throughout any given week, and have time to get more done with their day. 

“From a printing and scanning point of view, we’ve actually significantly reduced the amount of printing that we need to do in the office and send out to site. We end up with safer, and more productive assets moving into the future.”  

The challenges that Santos have been facing are not unique, explains Alex. As more companies move away from traditional paper based projects and into the digital space, Drawboard has a solution that allows you to utilize a more effective way of handling your processes digitally. 

For the future of Santos, David says that moving forward the company will be looking for solutions that will best support the success of their team. 

“Our vision is to be the safest, most reliable, low cost operator. That now impacts every decision that we make. So, if having the right information at the right time makes it safer for our people, if by being able to update that information we can be more reliable and lower cost, those are the areas we really look at. Drawboard PDF is part of that technology solution for us.” 

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