The UPS Story

As one of the energy industry’s largest service providers, Universal Plant Services (UPS) offers services across all sectors of the energy industry, from off-shore drilling through refining to power generation.

The company combines the industry’s best-trained, most qualified craftsmen and technicians with the highest standards of safety and service delivery. The company acts as a single source for inspection, repair and turnkey overhaul services. UPS keeps America’s offshore drilling rigs, refineries, petrochemical and chemical facilities, and energy plants safe and operating at their peak, a vital role for security of the country.UPS has divisions spread across the U.S. Over time, the company has added new business units through organic growth as well as acquisitions. As with every company that grows rapidly, they were faced with the need to manage multiple technology platforms, while providing their teams with the tools they need to operate effectively.

The Challenges They Were Facing.
UPS knew developing a cohesive set of business tools and applications for the entire company – not just one division at a time -- would improve their internal processes while helping create a more unified company. The challenge would be ensuring each technology platform operated at its best while being able to share information across platforms. UPS also recognized the need for mobile applications to meet the demands of their field-based employees. There were several hurdles to overcome:

• A lack of defined business processes resulted in technical or software solutions that only addressed the needs of a few, rather than the entire company.
• Without a Project Management Office, project management resources were limited.
• Finally, the software development cycle lacked maturity and an ability to take on more complex projects.

Finding A Solution
‍Poetic and UPS sat down to look at how to overcome these hurdles. Taking a strategic approach to transforming the business, the team created a customized, 3-year technology roadmap focused on future processes for UPS’ business functions, such as Timekeeping, Resource Allocation, and New Job Setup. The roadmap will ultimately result in new technical solutions for the business. 

After building the roadmap, Poetic kicked off several projects, including developing a mobile application for UPS employees, many of whom are located at remote customer sites around the world. To improve information flow and data sharing, the Poetic team engineered a custom GraphQL server to allow UPS’ more than 30 different communication, project management, and engineering tools to interact with each other. Poetic’s designers also created a user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) Style Guide for UPS’s internal development team to use with their suite of internal products, reducing complexity and helping create consistency across the company. And, using Apollo Engine, Poetic created a single dashboard to track and monitor queries and network service performance, isolating any errors for correction and follow-up analysis.