16,000 Hours Back: Where Did the Time Go?

Philip Richard remembers talking to one of his lease operators back when he was a young production engineer. The guy would tell him the same thing every time. He’d get out to the field at six in the morning, get home around four in the afternoon, and then spend three hours sitting at his computer entering reports.

Three hours. Every day. After a full shift in the field. Time that should have been spent at the dinner table, playing with his kids, or just sitting down for a minute. Instead, he was copying numbers from one place to another so somebody in the office could pull them into a different spreadsheet the next morning.

Philip is the CEO of Porosity now. He builds software that solves exactly this kind of problem. But that story stuck with him, because it’s not just one operator. It’s thousands of them, in every basin, doing the same thing. And when Porosity ran the numbers with one of their customers, the total came back at roughly sixteen thousand man-hours of pure data entry in a single year.

Sixteen thousand hours. Not on production. Not on maintenance. Not on safety. On typing things into boxes.

So here’s the question: if your people are spending that kind of time just moving data around, what are they not doing? And what is that costing you?

Where Sixteen Thousand Hours Actually Went

Philip walked through the specifics on the podcast, and the picture he painted is one that most people in this industry will recognize immediately.

This particular customer was running their LDAR program the way a lot of operators still do. Inspections were recorded in spreadsheets. When a leak was found, the information got communicated through emails and text messages. A lot of the inspections were being done by third-party companies, so there was another layer of communication trying to get the data from the inspector to the operator. Repairs got assigned through a chain of follow-ups.

Then at the end of the year, someone in the office had to pull all of that together into a regulatory filing. That meant gathering spreadsheets, tracking down records, reconciling data that didn’t match, and assembling reports that the state or federal regulators required.

None of this was laziness. These were competent people doing the best they could with broken tools. The process itself was the problem. And when every step requires a human being to manually move data from one place to another, the hours pile up fast.

What Changed When the Process Changed

Philip shared real numbers from what happened after this customer brought everything into the Porosity platform. And the results weren’t incremental. They were dramatic.

Their average time to repair a leak went from about a week and a half to a single day. That alone is significant. Philip did the math on it during the episode. An average leak of ten to twenty MCF a day costs roughly eight hundred dollars a day. Every day that leak sits unrepaired while someone shuffles paperwork, that money is bleeding into the air. Cut the response time from ten days to one, and the savings start compounding immediately.

But the time savings went deeper than leak response. Data entry errors dropped by ninety percent. The total time spent entering data dropped by fifty percent. And when they annualized that fifty percent reduction, it came out to roughly sixteen thousand man-hours that had been spent on nothing but pure data entry.

Reporting was the other major shift. What used to take a month to compile and prepare for regulators was now done with a single click. A month to a day. That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a completely different way of operating.

It Wasn’t the Technology. It Was the Design.

Here’s what makes Philip’s perspective worth paying attention to. He’s not selling technology for the sake of technology. He was a production engineer before he was a CEO. He wrote work over procedures. He maintained production across major shale basins. He sat in the same chair as the people he’s building tools for now.

And the lesson he keeps coming back to is simple: the way you design the input determines the quality of everything downstream. His CTO, who spent twelve years at AWS handling more data than most of us can comprehend, brought the same conviction into Porosity. Garbage in, garbage out. The easiest way to prevent garbage from coming in is to make the entry and the workflows around it as simple as possible.

Porosity built their mobile app to feel like an everyday consumer application. Philip compared the experience to something like Uber Eats or DoorDash, but tailored for the oilfield. That’s not a gimmick. When the tool feels natural, the operator doesn’t fight it. They step through the workflow, the data gets captured correctly, and nobody has to go home and spend three hours re-entering it on a laptop.

The sixteen thousand hours didn’t come back because someone bought a fancier dashboard. They came back because someone finally designed the process around the person doing the work instead of the person reading the report.

The Hours You Get Back Are the Hours That Matter Most

Philip made a point during the conversation that goes beyond software and gets at something deeper about what’s been happening in this industry.

A lease operator today isn’t just someone who collects gauges. They’re in charge of maintenance on their well sites. They’re in charge of safety. They’re in charge of compliance. Environmental regulations have increased the burden. Investor pressure to tighten margins has increased the burden. And all of it flows downhill to the person standing on the lease with nine hundred thousand other well sites across the country staffed by over three hundred thousand field operators carrying the same weight.

When Philip talks about giving hours back, he’s not talking about headcount efficiency for a boardroom presentation. He’s talking about the operator who gets home and doesn’t have to open a laptop. He’s talking about the production superintendent who can actually focus on operations instead of chasing data. He’s talking about engineers who can do the work they were hired to do instead of spending their time as human copy machines between spreadsheets.

Philip said it plainly on the show: what Porosity wants, more than anything, is for the people in the field to feel like they’re living a better life. That’s not a marketing line. That’s a guy who remembers what it was like to be on the other side of a broken process.

Philip Richard’s Playbook for Getting Time Back

Philip’s approach isn’t theoretical. It’s built on what he’s watched work across real customers in real basins. Here’s what operators and engineers should take from the conversation.

Stop fixing data in the office that was broken in the field. If the entry process is clunky, disconnected, or requires the operator to re-enter information after the job is done, the data will always be unreliable and the time cost will always be massive. Fix the process at the source.

Consolidate everything into one place. Philip’s customer was running their LDAR program across spreadsheets, emails, text messages, and third-party handoffs. The single biggest lever was putting all of that data into one system where an inspection triggers an alert, the alert triggers a repair, and the repair generates the compliance record. That’s how you go from a week and a half to a day.

Design for the field, not the office. Philip’s sales process starts with the production superintendent or foreman who’s tired of whipping out a laptop in the truck. If the field doesn’t adopt the tool, the data never improves. Build something they actually want to use, and adoption takes care of itself.

Measure what you’re actually getting back. Philip said Porosity loves to show customers the data on their own results, because it matters for the engineers leading these projects to see the impact they’re creating. Time to repair. Error rates. Hours spent on data entry. Reporting turnaround. When people see the numbers change, the commitment deepens.

If you’re still doing it the old way, the market won’t wait. Philip was direct about this. In a low commodity price environment, operators who keep running on spreadsheets and manual processes won’t have a choice. They’ll either adapt or they won’t exist. The tools are available. The question is whether leadership makes the move before the downturn makes it for them.

Final Thought

Sixteen thousand hours is a big number. It’s easy to turn it into a statistic for a slide deck or a talking point for a sales call. But that’s not what it is.

It’s the operator who gets home at four and actually stays home. It’s the engineer who spends the morning solving problems instead of chasing records. It’s the superintendent who can focus on operations because the data is already where it needs to be.

Philip Richard didn’t build Porosity to impress investors with efficiency metrics. He built it because he remembers what it felt like to watch good people lose their evenings to a process that never should have been that hard in the first place.

Give the time back. The rest follows.

If this question hit home, you’ll want to hear how it plays out in real operations.

Join Philip Richard, CEO of Porosity, on Wisdom at the Wellhead as he breaks down where the hours go, why the field deserves better tools, and what happens when you stop designing processes for the office and start building them for the people doing the work.