In this episode of the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast, Host Weldon Wright is joined by Ardis Bartle of Apex Measurement to discuss measurement SOPs in the oil and gas industry. 

Listen to the episode now to learn more about measurement standard operating procedures, their importance, and how they fit into the work we do. 

Where Do Measurement SOPs Fit In? Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

• Ardis Bartle is the manager of Apex Measurement and Controls LLC and a representative for Gas Certification Institute. Connect with Ardis on LinkedIn. Contact Ardis at ardisbartle@apexmeasurement.com
• FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) regulates, monitors, and investigates electricity, natural gas, hydropower, oil matters, natural gas pipelines, LNG terminals, hydroelectric dams, electric transmission, energy markets, and pricing.
  • FERC Order 636 was issued in 1992 to relax service requirements on pipeline firms and gave customers greater purchasing flexibility by separating gas sales from transportation. The order also extended transportation to include storage and allowed end-users with firm transport contracts to sell unused capacity.
• Sarbanes Oxley was a regulatory act introduced in 2002 by two U.S. Senators designed to address malfeasance in deregulated industries following the Enron scandal. SOX 404 determines a company’s internal system of checks and balances. (Read Ardis Bartle’s complete report on how Sarbanes Oxley affects gas measurement in distribution and pipeline systems.)
• Upstream is the operation stage in the oil and gas industry that involves exploration and production. 
• Midstream is the processing, storing, transporting and marketing of oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids.
• Downstream is the process involved in converting oil and gas into the finished product, including refining crude oil into gasoline, natural gas liquids, diesel, and a variety of other energy sources. The closer an oil and gas company is to the process of providing consumers with petroleum products, the further downstream the company is said to be.
• BTU (British Thermal Unit) is a measure of the heat content of fuels or energy sources. It is the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by 1 degree Fahrenheit at the temperature that water has its greatest density (approximately 39 degrees Fahrenheit).
• Operations Manual or Measurement Operations Manual is a granular, task execution-oriented manual providing guidance on safely conducting individual field activities.
  •  Operations Manuals are typically geared toward compliance with the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s (PHMSA) Operator Qualification training and proficiency testing, which focus on assuring pubic and worker safety. 
  • A measurement operations manual might contain guidance on how to perform several different sampling procedures properly and safely, but would not provide guidance on how to select the appropriate procedure.  
• Measurement SOPs or Standard Operating Procedures Manual refers to a document or set of documents that provides a comprehensive guide for overall measurement operations. It combines the requirements needed to meet contractual/tariff requirements, regulations, industry standards, and company specific operating requirements into a single reference manual.
  • This will include guidelines on reporting and documentation, standards for testing and calibration equipment, and record handling.
• Website that lists all Interstate Tariffs for Natural Gas Pipelines in the US.
• Contracts vs Tariffs: Agreements between parties in the natural gas exploration, production, processing, transportation, and distribution industry operate under either Contracts or Tariffs.
  • Contracts are private agreements between parties and the terms are generally considered confidential. The commonly exist between E&P companies and the gathering/processing companies, as well as some non-utility intrastate pipelines.
  • Tariffs are public documents that define the terms for transporting gas with a common carrier.  All interstate and some intrastate pipelines operate under tariffs.

Where Do Measurement SOPs Fit In? Full Episode Transcript

Weldon Wright: Welcome to episode 31 of the “Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast,” sponsored by GCI, the Gas Certification Institute. For more than 20 years, GCI has been providing measurement, fundamentals training, and measurement standard operating procedures for the oil and gas industry.

GCI is instructor-led gas measurement and liquid measurement training classes, coupled with comprehensive standard operating procedures for measurement, providing valuable tools for both the back office and field personnel.

[background music]

Announcer: Welcome to the Oil & Gas Measurement Podcast, where measurement professionals, Bubba geeks, and gurus share their knowledge, experience, and likely a tall tale or two on measurement topics for the oil and gas industry. And now, your host, Weldon Wright.

Weldon: Hello, I’m your host, Weldon Wright, with FPP Prime Measurement Consulting. I’m here today with a dear friend, and arguably one of the most dynamic personalities in oil and gas measurement, Ardis Bartle, with Apex Measurement. Howdy, Ardis? How are you doing today?

Ardis Bartle: Hey Weldon, I’m doing great. How are you?

Weldon: I’m doing great, except the fact that I’m under the weather a little bit with spring allergy. Ardis, tell us a little bit about yourself. I’ve known you for 25-plus years. Tell the audience about yourself and what you do.

Ardis: I’m Ardis Bartle with Apex Measurement. I am also the lead at Gas Certification Institute. I run one of the premier measurement training centers. GCI has been around for about 30 years. The predominant thing that we do at the training center is training on measurement standards, not equipment.

We teach probably the hardest thing to teach, but we also teach the part that everybody should have. I call it the kindergarten of the measurement industry. Why do we do what measurement? Why do we do what we do, and how do we do it correctly in order to be correct?

My background is, before Apex measurement, I was with a company called PGAS. That was one of the predominant measurement software systems in the business. I have traveled through this industry when there was no such thing as FERC 636, and that will be something I will talk with you guys about when we get to that point.

I’ve been around a long time when there was really no understanding of why we did custody transfer measurement throughout the industry before FERC 636. I’ve been around for a long time.

Weldon: Ardis, is pretty unique in their industry in that she has become the focal point of coordinating what three different, maybe four different standard organizations are doing now, right? She sits on just about every standards committees out there. If she doesn’t actually sit on the committee, she has her ear to what’s going on in those committees.

That makes Ardis a very valuable resource to everybody in their industry. Now what I’ve asked Ardis here to talk about today is standard operating procedures, SOPs. Everybody hears about these. Some companies have some that have been sitting on a shelf for 20 years.

For the folks out in the field, the rank and file technician, the field supervisors, the measurement analyst in the back office, many of them don’t understand how SOPs fit in with what we do and how they’re important. Ardis, can you enlighten us?

Ardis: Let’s talk about what a standard operating procedure is versus what we predominantly know in the business as a measurement operations manual. Many clients over the years, many companies have developed something called a measurement operations manual. That gives the guy in the field, gives the whole measurement team guidance.

Guidance as to qualified vendors that they can purchase, qualifications on equipment, qualifications on how we build a meter run. Operation standard documents or measurement operation documents are extremely valuable, but they have one small flaw or problem.

They don’t really provide a set of executables that a measurement technician or a third party can execute out in the field. Measurement standard operating procedures fit into a unique, but important role in your company.

In order to talk about that, would you mind if I went back and talked about FERC 636 and how that moved into Sarbanes Oxley?

Weldon: Sure, Ardis.

Ardis: When I started in the industry many of my clients had started, were involved in the Enron transition of how the business was conducted. If everyone remembers, a gentleman named Ken Lay from Enron came and said to the federal government that we would like to deregulate the pipelines, both gas and liquids.

That was just right after the US government had deregulated all the airlines. That transition, in order to make it equitable, the US government created an organization, a federal agency called FERC 636. FERC 636 changed the way pipelines move product.

Pipelines became what I call a true carrier. All those businesses associated with pipelines, like gas labs, they became third party. Training centers, they were spun off. Research and development, they were removed. FERC 636 changed the way that we did business in the measurement world in the sense that pipelines and midstreams became true carriers.

Now, that whole movement required that accuracy and custody transfer be the utmost importance, because a true carrier would be responsible for moving that product, or being sustained with extremely high penalties. Again, they had to measure the gas accurately and they had to get it. The big movers decided that they, and had always been associated with the standards.

If you look at any FERC contract, which there is a website that has every midstream and pipeline contract for the US and Canada, all of them have a measurement contract language that they abide by industry standards.

Under that facility, or under that paragraph, they will actually have details of how they meet those standards and sometimes they will list out those standards. We went along for a while until the major fiasco at Enron.

Ken Lay testified in front of Congress that he had no idea what financial transactions his company Enron did. Two senators, Senator Sarbanes and Senator Oxley, created the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which required any company over $75 million a year to be totally transparent at all levels to all financial transactions.

Those financial transactions, which generally apply to companies over $75 million, were what we usually would assume would be accounting transactions. What the US government had thought about and what most of the industry had thought about is oil and gas, transportation, oil and gas production, oil and gas gathering is a financial transaction. It is a cash register of the companies.

Weldon: Absolutely. You can’t worry about financial regulations if you don’t look at the cash register.

Ardis: With this event, or with this new act, companies had to demonstrate that they were transparent, and they were financially transparent and fairly equal or fair to all their partners that they had contractual agreements with.

Now, Weldon, I’m going to go back and discuss how we do business in the United States and how that ties in with Sarbanes-Oxley. In the United States and in Canada, we generally do business with a contract. For example, midstreams have contracts with their partners, their producers. Producers have partners with contracts with landowners.

Midstreams have contracts with pipelines. Pipelines have contracts with distribution companies. We are very contractually oriented, except where we deal with the federal government. Generally, that works with producers, will have contracts with the Bureau of Land Management, or companies will have contracts with BSEE, which is the offshore equivalent of our industry.

The challenge being that each of those contracts specifically outlines how measurement is to be done. Those contracts may all not be the same. The reason behind that, you’re probably asking me, is why. It’s because attorneys and engineers write the contracts, not measurement people.

Based on that, we now have a system of contracts that everybody has to abide by. When that measurement technician gets in the truck in the morning, Weldon, and decides to go out and work on three wells from this ranch and four wells from another facility, how many of those contracts is he carrying around with him?

Weldon: Absolutely zero. In fact, in our industry, we get to the point that where because of the actual deal data, the financial data, if you’re operating under a contract and not a tariff, it’s very likely that no one in the field has ever seen or laid hands on the actual contracts themselves.

All of our measurement requirements are buried in the same document with how much money we make, and we don’t want to share that, right?

Ardis: Nope. Now you have a measurement technician. You can send him out with the measurement operations manuals, but they tell him which equipment to use, they tell him what they think he should be doing. They give him a general outline, but they don’t give him an executable. You also send him, you don’t send him out with the contracts. How does he know how to do his job?

Now, there’s more challenges to this business above that. I have a measurement technician who comes from predominantly large company like El Paso or Kinder Morgan. He now comes to work for another organization, and he’s going to do his job like he was trained at Kinder Morgan or El Paso, which may or may not meet to the contract.

The other challenge is that all these people who are trying to do their jobs are not necessarily employees of your company. It is very common that we use third parties in the industry. I use a third party to gather lab samples. Again, gathering lab samples or gathering that sample, that heated sample, that’s my BTUs.

That is so important because I’ve not trading gas on volume. I’m trading gas on BTUs. I need to make sure that third-party knows how to handle my samples.

Weldon: Not only the third-party knows how to handle it, Ardis, if you’re using third party, that third party technician may be doing work with a number of different customers of that service company. They could be subtle differences. We all know in our industry, subtle can turn into a lot of money in a hurry.

Ardis: Again, I have all these people out doing their job, but I need to provide them guidance. Now, it gets complicated here because I have many partners. If I take a typical producer or I take a typical midstream, I may have in one little organization, one geographical area, 10 to 30 partners. That’s 10 to 30 contracts.

How do I prove when they come in to either review, or audit, or look at my data that I am being fair and transparent in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley? Most companies who are interested in being sold, interested in being Fortune 500, interested in being recognize players in the industry follow Sarbanes-Oxley.

They are not necessarily all $75 million companies, but they all want to represent fair and transparent accounting and part and practices through the industry. I now have a challenge. If I took that measurement manual out and I gave it to an auditor and or I gave it to a reviewer, I gave it to a partner and he tried to go out and follow what my technician did all day, he would not be necessarily that successful.

If he had a set of standard operating procedures that were executables that he could follow, and then he could look at the governance, that means the control evidence, the result of what occurred out in the field, then he could assure himself that he is being treated fair, transparent, and impartially through that whole process.

Weldon: Ardis, I’d like to wrap back around to something you mentioned twice now, and I’d just like to get a little better definition. I know what you’re talking about, but I want to make sure we don’t lose any of our guests. When you talked about the difference between a measurement operations manual and a standard operating procedures manual, you used the word executables a couple times.

You just used it now. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. That’s the difference folks between saying, “I’m going to test on this frequency, I’m going to use a Fisher 809.” It’s a difference in those things and the actual prescribed details of saying, “Here’s are my steps. Here is how I document. If I’m going to catch a sample, I’m doing my sample according to this procedure.”

Ardis: An executable aligns with several things. First of all, in an executable, you need to have a scope. That I am going to take a gas sample on this type of basis. Then I need to have applicable. What standard am I going to follow? Am I going to follow GPA 2166, which is now API 14A, or am I going to follow GPA 2174? Again, clearly define the applicable standard.

Then I’m going to file the applicability. Does this apply to only gas samples that are custody transfer? Gas samples that are custody transfer and allocation? Also, in every standard operating executable, I need to have clear and precise governance. Who has responsibility for this? SOP?

This was one of the major factors of Sarbanes-Oxley, is accountability. That accountability must be clear and in writing, all the way to the highest level.

Weldon: All the way to the highest level, just to cut you off a minute, that means the root of Sarbanes-Oxley. Ardis and I have talked about this multiple times before, Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t mention measurement per se. They talk about accountability for the practices and the risk of a company.

What Sarbanes-Oxley says is the president and the board of directors of your company is signing off on saying, “We believe this has been done right, and we’re willing to go to jail if it’s not.” That’s a pretty strong thing for those guys to stop, sign off at.

That’s why we have these internal audit firms, as well as an outside third party, like a PWC, or something like that, that comes in reviews or Sarbanes-Oxley-related controls, and helps that board of directors decide, “Yes, I’m willing to sign that.” Sorry about that interrupting your speech tonight.

Ardis: No, no, no, OK. We’ve talked about governance. Now, another key clear item within Sarbanes-Oxley is frequency. Every standard operating procedure, every executable, needs to identify frequency.

Now, the interesting thing is, many midstream pipelines and producers have these tools that help them determine when they take a sample, when they do a verification, when they do a calibration, when they do approving.

The standard operating procedure must identify that in the document in order to be fair, impartial, and meet Sarbanes-Oxley. Again, frequency is important. I want to make sure you treat my wells or my interconnect as freely as you treat the other.

Other items that are important, of course, the procedure, and then an executable has no value if there’s no control evidence. If I don’t have something either in writing or a electronic copy of a document or electronic tool like TESTit or Tech Tools, then how do I move forward?

Weldon: Got to be documented.

Ardis: That’s right. That executable that has a scope, applicability, frequency, the standard, the governance, the control evidence, that is an executable that anyone who is out in the industry can get behind.

The landowner can watch the tech execute this. The tech can ensure the third party is executing this, and at any time, the president of the company can ride with one of his technicians and ensure himself that this is being done correctly.

Weldon: Yeah, let me know when that really happens…

Ardis: I will.

Weldon: …but I get your point. You’re very right here, Ardis, and you put that better than I can. The thing that we boiled down to, that I always distill it to, is people say, “I just need to follow the right, the right standards, the right rules.”

As you mentioned, if we’re a transportation pipeline, we may be under tariff, but I know companies that have multiple tariffs, all with slight measurement subtleties between the pipelines. As you mentioned, if you’re midstream, you may have a different contract for each customer on the system.

All of those are going to reference their standards, and people that are not aware of the standards process, the standards bodies and how many are out there, they just assume we’re talking about, and here’s some air quotes, “the measurement standard.” But there’s not a measurement standard. There’s hundreds, Ardis.

Ardis: Let me talk about that because I serve, as you do, you serve on American Gas Association with me, an API, I monitor and help out at GPA, and of course, I’m on NCB 109. What do we do when we write a standard?

What we are attempting to do is to create a set of requirements that’s the minimum of what we think needs to be done in order to ensure a certain level of uncertainty. We are addressing the fact that you are going to go out there and do a task, and these are the minimum requirements in order to be successful.

Now, here’s the challenge. We very rarely say “shall.” Most of the time, we say “should” in many cases. We do not define frequency in standards. We do not define uncertainty levels. We do not define many of the things.

What we do is we take test and we take testing, hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of testing, to inform you that the fully developed flow profile will work better with a conditioner. We talk about how long the lengths are, what the installation should be. We’re giving you the minimum. That’s all we’re giving.

Now, your standard operating procedures may say that we need to have an uncertainty level of 0.2 percent, and ergo, your SOPs reflect meeting that obligation. I cannot say that’s why everybody is different.

There’s a contract, but developing a standard, you can’t pick up a standard and just read a standard and determine what your job is for the day. It’s not easy and it’s not recommended on a daily basis.

Weldon: First of all, most of our standards are not what you would call easy reading.

Ardis: No.

Weldon: Those are very standards are really a cure for insomnia. They’re heavy on technical details, research data. For any given task you do in the field, you don’t need 90 percent, 95 percent, or even 99 percent of what’s in that standard. You need the 1 percent for the task you’re charged at doing today.

If we recorded video on our podcast you would see that both artists and I are sitting in front of bookshelves. Bookshelves that are predominantly filled with standards. Artist has a couple of bookshelves just to capture the most current version of all of those standards.

It’s just not practical for that field tech, that supervisor to have access to all of that stuff and to understand how he needs to be pointed to where do I need to go? That’s part of what our SOPs do. They distill down to the pieces we need to do our specific tasks, right?

Ardis: Here’s your other challenge. If I gave every tech a set of gas measurement set of standards, for example. If I gave them their minimum standards that they need to verify and calibrate a gas meter, that’s about $400, $500 worth of standards I’d be putting into their truck that they may or may not be able to look through and use.

Much easier to give them and standard operating procedure, which tells them how to help and do their work, and what the expectation is when they complete that and what that result will look like. Rather than giving them $500 or $600…

You can’t give every tech $500 or $600 standards to ride in his truck every day. It’s just not reasonable. As soon as we update that standard needs to be updated.

Weldon: They would leave the window open and it all get wet.

Ardis: I’ve seen tech trucks and they’re like filing cabinets right next to them.

Weldon: Exactly.

Ardis: I totally understand that.

Weldon: You’ve talked to us a little bit about how we got to this need. We’ve talked a little bit about what those standards give us, how they guide us through their executables, right?

Ardis: Right.

Weldon: One of the things we haven’t talked about is, we haven’t talked about the fact that standards get revised. We haven’t talked about the fact that we write new contracts. We change tariffs. We haven’t talked about the fact that we get new equipment. New technology comes out there.

Talk to us a little bit about if my company went out there, and I made a pretty big investment of developing a good set of SOPs for my operations, and I did that back in 2005, which to me doesn’t sound long ago, right? Are my standards still great? Are they still in good shape?

Ardis: It would be questionable. Let’s just talk about what standard organizations do, and then how that affects you. API and AJA have a schedule of updating standards or reaffirming them every 5 to 10 years. Those that schedule is determined upon what testing is out there and what is known about the technology at the time of opening that standard.

We have something called red lines, red notes, where we know that things have changed. We need to go back and reaffirm, rewrite, revise that standard. If you had standards back to 2005, how many reaffirmations or revisions have happened since 2024? Probably 10.

You might be substantially behind in what you’re doing. The question is does your contract say that you’re meeting 2005 standards? Or are you meeting the latest industry standards? That’s a question I would always ask my client, is you have a contract.

Now here’s the other problem. The company that you work for now is probably not the same company when you wrote those standards. When you wrote those standards in 2005 did you own all the assets you own now, or have you acquired new assets if you’ve acquired new assets, what do those contracts say? Do you look…?

[crosstalk]

Weldon: …does it say? Chances are you may work for a company that’s a fisher company. You may have done an acquisition that bought ABBs.

Ardis: Do you have some clients with one contract that specifies one way of doing sampling and another way? One meeting an older standard, not? If you have BLM properties, you’re meeting BLM regulations, which is a whole set of standard operating procedures different than what you’re treating the rest of your existing clients.

That’s another problem. Here’s a third problem. You did not get any contracts with the acquisitions. In the due diligence of how we manage acquisitions, do you think lawyers think to get all those measurement contracts in their hot little hands during that 60-day due diligence acquisition thing? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Now you’re stuck because you’ve got a bunch of assets that have no contracts with them that you know of, and client doesn’t have the assets. How do you take all of this and make it fair and equitable? Do I treat those guys with no contract differently than I treat the rest of them?

Standard operating procedures allow your company to have total transparency to all of your partners, how you conduct your measurement on a daily basis. If I go out with Fred and drive with Fred for the day and I see the way he does measurement, the next day when I go out with Tom, I should see the exact same thing.

It shouldn’t make any difference as long as I am abiding by the existing contracts and making sure that everyone is being treated fairly and equitably. Based on that, I now have several challenges. One is, do I actually know where that original set of SOPs was developed?

Take no offense, but for a while there in the industry, we like to copy and paste — and El Paso is probably the most famous — standard operating procedures through the industry. I’ve seen copies of El Paso out there. They’re totally outdated. They desperately need help and work in that area.

We might have written something custom made 10, 15 years ago that have not been updated. This year, and the last year, has been a very busy year on the liquid side of the business. API 4A, which is your proving SOP, has been dramatically updated. Your liquid Coriolis has been dramatically updated. Actually, AGA 9, your gas, your ultrasonics have been updated.

Weldon: Even the last couple of years, Ardis, we’ve seen some tiny, but significant changes in the sampling standard, right? The sample separators are back in, back out, they’re out again today — subtleties. We all know subtleties in our business can mean lots of money.

Ardis: I always tell my guys, when’s the last time anyone’s looked at these? We always at GCI, we’ll always take a look at what you have under a nondisclosure, an MSA agreement. Give you some feedback on things that need to be updated.

The question I always ask is, what do you have? What are you using? And how are you using it? Be aware that everyone says they have a set of standard operating procedures, but when it comes to the rubber meeting the road, sometimes I find out they have one or two pages that are written, and that’s their standard operating procedure.

Again, there are good ones. There are people who keep theirs up. Then there are those who now need to do something and have a company that does not look like the company they had 10 years ago.

Weldon: Ardis, one of the things that I’ve seen it way too often. I actually had a customer I was working with probably 10 years ago, used this phrase the first time. I said, I was going to steal it and use it often, but I forget about it. You reminded me to it again. They called it vampire documents.

Ardis: Oh yeah.

Weldon: They’re documentations that was afraid of the light. They had SOPs. They had other documents. They were somewhere in a file room, a storage room, locked away, and no one saw. When we talk about this, SOPs need to be something, the text in the field, the supervisor, the office they live by, right?

Because we all know audits happen in their industry, right? The better your company operates, and if your customers think you’re doing your job right, if they see good operation, your chances of auditing are probably a little lower, right?

If differences start to happen, or they don’t think your house is in order, they’ll pop up with a full measurement audit.

Ardis: That’s true.

Weldon: Now when an auditor comes in for a real measurement audit, the first thing they’re going to do is read the contracts. The second thing they’re going to want is to look at your measurement standard operating procedures, and then they’re going to be reviewing data, test reports, sampling frequency, testing frequency, the type of equipment that’s being used.

To make sure that they’re in line with what that contract, that tariff says, of what the SOPs say, and the standards they point to. Those documents need to be alive and they need to be maintained.

Ardis: All questions start with a data review. You’re absolutely right, Weldon. If I’m going to review, if I have a question about the data, I’m going to ask you several questions. I’m going to look at the contract, I’m going to look at the SOPs, and then I’m going to look at the data associated with those processes.

If you can easily bring all those up and send those to me, and I can verify all that, I’m moving on. There’s something else going on. These are all things that are important in that industry from that angle. The other thing I want to bring up, Weldon, is standard operating procedures are just not verification, calibration, or operations and maintenance. They’re also installation and QA.

In the standards committees, I know everybody thinks that we argue all day long about how you quality assure an ultrasonic or Coriolis meter or how you install it. We have hundreds of thousands of dollars of testing associated with installation in QA.

Your standard operating procedure needs to also have a way that you can quality assure that Coriolis has been tested and it’s correctly ready to go. Then, two, how it’s installed correctly in the build. I always tell my students this.

What do you think the odds are if I’ve installed that or not QA that Coriolis meter, that ultrasonic, or that orifice meter correctly? What are the odds that my measurement’s going to be right after I’ve installed it? If I’ve installed it wrong? None.

Weldon: That’s really what we get down to. Right, Ardis?

Ardis: Oh, my challenge is who installs equipment in the field? Facilities, construction, and third parties. If the measurement team does not have a set of SOPs that should be followed. If the measurement team does not go out and inspect the meter runs with the ultrasonics of the coils before they’re installed.

If the measurement team does not assure themselves, once that system is in, they’re stuck with it and the measurement’s wrong and will always be wrong, until you bring a third party out and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell you that it’s wrong, which you knew from the beginning.

I hate to do this to people, but you got ultrasonic manual. I spend almost 29 pages on installation and startup. My engineers tell me they don’t read that every single day. They read the other stuff. That the problem with all of this is my SOPs have to be from the beginning till the end.

How do I install? How do I QA? How do I verify to calibrate? How do I witness, and then how do I maintain that or replace it when it’s broken? I don’t have that complete set that I’m all over…Then, I’m sitting here with half of the piece of the puzzle, and the other half, a cliff, that I’m falling off of on a daily basis.

Weldon: Ardis, that state which you made before the very end recap summed up the whole process a lot. It needs to be from the beginning, from before we install, to how we operate, and I’m going to do something, Ardis, I know is one of the few things you have trouble doing. Can you wrap this up and give us a short summary in a couple of minutes, because we’re going to run out of time here.

Ardis: Oh, we are? Sorry about that. You can live without standard operating procedures, but you’re going to live very difficultly. You will have technicians, and you will have people who will do their own thing. You will work in a measurement group, where the previous culture, and everybody is on their own page. Standard operating procedures brings your whole group as one entity together and makes you one culture, one business, one mind think. That’s the best way I can describe standard operating procedures for you, guys.

Weldon: Great, Ardis. It’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast. I knew you were not disappoint today. We’ll have Ardis’ contact information in the show notes of this episode. Feel free to give her a call. Call her. Reach out on LinkedIn. Shoot her an email if you have more questions or thoughts about this, folks. Thanks again, Ardis. Great to have you as a guest.

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Weldon: I want to thank each of you for listening, and I hope you found this episode both interesting and informative. We will have a full transcript of this episode, along with Ardis’ LinkedIn contact info in our show notes of the website, pipelinepodcastnetwork.com. Your reviews will help folks find our podcast. Give us a review on iTunes, Google, or wherever you get your podcast fixes from.

As always, if you have comments or questions about the episode, suggestions for future topics, or if you would like to offer yourself up to the podcast mic as a guest, send me a message on LinkedIn or shoot me an email at weldon.wright@fpvprime.com.