Reduce LOE without cutting the field.
Lease operating expense falls one of two ways: pay for fewer field hours, or get more production out of the field hours you already pay for. The first cuts the capacity that keeps wells producing, and the savings leak back out as deferred production. The second is an allocation problem: which wells get today’s hours. WellOPS solves that allocation every morning, in dollars.
The problem
The largest controllable line in LOE is field time, and nothing ranks how it gets spent.
Labor and windshield time sit at the top of the controllable LOE stack, and on most operations that time is scheduled by habit: the same routes on the same days, whatever changed overnight. The exception queue that is supposed to redirect it cannot price what it shows. A low-rate well alarms with the same urgency as the highest cash flow producer in the field, so the morning gets triaged by memory, proximity, and instinct.
The result is field hours, already paid for, spent on stops that carry no dollars this morning, while the work that does carry dollars waits for its calendar day. That gap between what the field could return and what the schedule asks of it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as LOE per BOE that will not move.
The consequence
Cut the crew with fixed routes still in place, and the math turns on you.
The same route miles spread across fewer people stretch the visit cadence on every well. Down wells wait longer for a truck, deferred production compounds quietly, and run time slips. LOE per BOE has a denominator: when barrels fall, the ratio climbs back toward where it started, and the savings you booked on the payroll line leak out through the production line.
The ratio improves when barrels rise as surely as when dollars fall, which is why the durable LOE program is an allocation program. The question that matters is not how few people you can run with. It is where the next field hour goes, and when you will actually need the next person: ahead of the schedule rather than behind it.
The WorkSync decision
The same crew, allocated by dollars.
WellOPS reads the systems you already run, flags the work, prices every open job in dollars per day, ranks it against everything else in the field, and routes your crews by value. The loop runs every morning: Flag, Price, Rank, Route, Execute, Learn. Nothing about it asks for more people. It asks the field hours you already pay for to land where they are worth the most.
The morning plan the cost program actually needs: every stop justified in dollars per day before a truck rolls. Illustrative data.
What goes in
SCADA, production, equipment, and field data over read-only connections. Deviation is measured against what each well should be doing, not a fixed threshold, so stale alarm limits stop setting the schedule.
How a job gets priced
Production at risk, intervention economics, equipment condition, safety and regulatory constraints, crew capability, and drive time. Every job competes on one economic ruler, so the queue can finally settle the morning argument.
What the field sees
A ranked, routed day in the cab by 6 AM, with the reason each stop is on it. Close-out happens at the wellhead, so what was found, done, and worth flows straight back into the ranking.
Proof
Measured in the field. Not modeled in a spreadsheet.
Deployment figures measured across 5,000+ wells in live operations at a top 25 private producer. Results are not projections. What transfers to your operation is exactly what the 4-week pilot measures.
Go deeper
The lever-by-lever playbook
This page is the executive argument. The category education, ten controllable LOE levers ranked by impact with benchmarks, lives on its own page.
Read the 10-lever LOE playbook →Run the numbers on your field
Enter your well count, production, and crew, and see what value-ranked routing is worth on your own inputs, every assumption labeled.
Open Route Economics →The platform underneath
WellOPS is the operating platform behind the ranked day: prioritization, work management, route optimization, field data capture, and accruals.
Walk the WellOPS platform →What would your field work on tomorrow?
Bring us one field’s data. We’ll rank the work, show you the economics, and you decide whether it’s worth doing. The pilot measures your numbers, not ours.
See Your Wells Ranked