How to Maximize SCADA System Use: 7 Strategies for Oil and Gas Operations

Most oil and gas operations only use a fraction of the capabilities built into their SCADA platforms. Companies pay for advanced modules, analytics, and integration features, yet day-to-day use often centers on basic monitoring and a few familiar screens. The result is duplicated manual effort, slower response to issues, and a weaker return on software investment than leadership expects.

Maximizing SCADA system use isn’t about flipping on every feature you’ve licensed. It’s about applying the right capabilities, at the right time, to solve real operational problems: reducing manual work, improving visibility and responsiveness across the field, and generating outcomes you can quantify in cost savings, uptime improvements, or production gains.

The seven strategies below are designed for SCADA managers, operations leaders, and plant supervisors who know their systems can do more but aren’t sure how to get teams on board.

1. Target Your Biggest Time Wasters First

The most effective place to begin is not with technology, but with how people actually work today. Sit with field operators, controllers, and supervisors during normal operations. Watch the tasks they perform repeatedly, where they wait on data, and where they rely on paper or spreadsheets.

You’ll usually see three recurring friction points:

• Manual Data Entry: Operators re-keying production volumes from SCADA into accounting or regulatory tools.
• Redundant Reporting: Teams rebuilding the same daily reports in multiple systems by manually stitching together historian exports and spreadsheet data.
• Information Hunting: Logging into multiple platforms to answer basic questions about rates, alarms, or asset status.

The Solution: Instrumentation, Integration, and Screen Design

The solution to these inefficiencies lies in three specific areas: instrumentation, integration, and screen design.

First, you must ensure you have the right instrumentation to digitize values—SCADA can’t read what isn’t measured.

Second, you need integration that allows systems to talk to each other, eliminating the need for manual transcription.

Finally, you need optimized screen design that consolidates relevant data into a single view, so operators have the information they need right in front of them without hunting.

Research indicates that optimized SCADA implementations can reduce unscheduled downtime by up to 15% and maintenance costs by 30%.[1] The key is to start small: choose one high-friction workflow, apply these principles to streamline it, and quantify the hours saved.

2. Implement Role-Based Training Programs

Generic software training in the oil and gas industry is often notoriously ineffective. It typically involves long, lecture-style sessions that walk through every menu item, regardless of relevance. The result is “feature fatigue,” where operators forget 90% of what they heard before they even leave the room.

To maximize SCADA system use, you must pivot to role-based training. This approach recognizes that a Field Operator, a Control Room Operator, and a Maintenance Planner have fundamentally different needs:

• Field Operators need to know how to acknowledge alarms on mobile devices, input downtime codes, and check tank levels.
• Control Room Operators need deep training on alarm handling, trend analysis, and emergency shutdown (ESD) procedures.
• Maintenance Planners need to understand how to access runtime hours and equipment state histories to plan work orders.

Build “Micro-Modules”

Instead of day-long seminars, build focused 15-minute training modules based on real scenarios from your field data. For example, create a “Compressor Troubleshooting” module that shows a graph of a real compressor failure from last month. Ask the team: “Looking at these pre-failure vibration trends, at what point should we have intervened?” This method turns abstract software training into practical problem-solving. It builds muscle memory for using SCADA tools to solve daily problems. As noted in our guidance on modern web design principles for SCADA, the interface itself should be intuitive enough to support this training, guiding users naturally to the right information.

3. Establish Software Champions in Each Department

Top-down mandates are rarely as effective as peer-to-peer influence. If you want to drive genuine adoption of advanced SCADA features, you need Software Champions embedded within your operational teams.

A Software Champion is not necessarily a manager or an IT specialist. They are often a respected senior operator or a tech-savvy engineer who naturally enjoys solving problems. Their role is to bridge the gap between the technical potential of the system and the practical reality of the field.

Responsibilities of a Champion:

• The “Super User”: They are the first line of support for their peers, answering questions like “How do I build a trend for this well?” without needing to open an IT ticket.
• The Translator: They translate field complaints into technical requirements. When an operator says, “This screen is cluttered,” the Champion translates that for the SCADA team: “We need to declutter the separator view by moving the PID tuning parameters to a popup window.”
• The Beta Tester: They test new features or dashboards first, ensuring that when a rollout happens, it actually works for the people who need it.

By empowering these individuals, you create a culture of continuous improvement. When a peer shows an operator how a new shortcut saves them 20 minutes of reporting time, adoption spreads virally.

4. Integrate Systems for Predictive Maintenance

Data integration is the force multiplier of SCADA. While SCADA is excellent at real-time monitoring, its value skyrockets when it feeds data into other enterprise systems. The “Holy Grail” for many oil and gas operators is the shift from reactive maintenance to condition-based maintenance (CBM).

The CMMS Connection

Consider integrating your SCADA system with your Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system like IBM Maximo or SAP.

• The Old Way (Time-Based): You schedule a preventive maintenance (PM) work order for a pump every 6 months, regardless of whether it ran 24/7 or sat idle for 3 months. This leads to unnecessary spending or, conversely, failures in equipment that ran harder than expected.
• The New Way (Condition-Based): SCADA tracks the actual runtime hours and vibration levels. When the runtime hits 5,000 hours, or when vibration exceeds a set threshold, SCADA pushes a tag to the EAM, which automatically generates a work order.

Technical Enablers

This level of integration is easier than ever with modern protocols like MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) and Sparkplug B, which decouple devices from applications. Instead of building brittle, point-to-point connections, your SCADA system publishes data to a central “broker” that your maintenance software subscribes to. For more on how this architecture works, CSE ICON’s article on advantages of an enterprise SCADA system details how centralized data brokers can facilitate these high-value integrations without disrupting operations.

5. Rationalize Alarms Using ISA 18.2 Standards

One of the biggest barriers to maximizing SCADA utility is “Alarm Flood.” When operators are bombarded with hundreds of alarms per shift—many of them nuisance alarms for minor issues—they become desensitized. This “normalization of deviance” is a leading cause of major industrial accidents; operators ignore the critical “High Level” alarm because it looks just like the 50 “Low Battery” alarms they’ve already acknowledged today. To fix this, adopt the ANSI/ISA-18.2 standard for Alarm Management. This engineering standard provides a rigorous framework for deciding what counts as an alarm.

Key ISA 18.2 Concepts to Implement:

• Rationalization: Review every configured alarm and ask: “Does this require immediate operator action?” If the answer is no (e.g., it’s just for information), change it from an Alarm to an Event or Log. It should not flash red on the screen.
• Shelving: Give operators the ability to temporarily “shelve” (suppress) an alarm for a specific duration while they are working on the equipment. This prevents the distraction of a constant alarm during maintenance, while ensuring it automatically re-enables afterwards so it isn’t forgotten.
• Deadbands and Delays: Configure “On-Delays” (e.g., level must be high for >10 seconds) to prevent fleeting spikes from triggering alarms. Use deadbands so a value hovering right at the setpoint doesn’t toggle the alarm on and off rapidly (chattering).

A well-tuned alarm system is quiet. When a horn sounds or a screen flashes red, operators should know it is a genuine priority. Also, visual design plays a huge role here. Following industry standards for HMI design ensures that these workflows are intuitive. CSE ICON’s blog series on API RP 1165 offers a deep dive into how standardized displays and color philosophies can reduce operator error and improve situational awareness.

6. Standardize Workflows and Procedures

SCADA should not just show you what is happening; it should guide you on what to do about it. Standardizing workflows directly inside the SCADA interface reduces variability between shifts and ensures that best practices are always followed.

Example: The Startup Sequence

Consider a compressor startup. One operator might manually check suction pressure, then lube oil temp, then hit start. Another might check the discharge valve first.

• The Fix: Build a “Startup Permissive” dashboard. This screen visually lists the 5 required conditions (Valve A Open, Temp > 100°F, etc.) with green/red status lights next to each. The “Start” button only enables when all lights are green.

This is a basic form of a Digital Twin concept—modeling the process logic within the software. You can extend this to incident response as well. When a “High H2S” alarm triggers, the SCADA screen should automatically pop up a sidebar displaying the relevant emergency response procedure, a link to the muster point map, and a “Call Control Room” button. By embedding procedures into the HMI (Human-Machine Interface), you reduce the cognitive load on operators during high-stress events. For guidance on designing these intuitive layouts, refer to Modern Web Design Principles for SCADA: Beyond Traditional HMI Standards

7. Conduct Regular Usage and Cybersecurity Reviews

Optimization is not a one-time project; it is a lifecycle. The operational reality of an oil field changes constantly—new wells are drilled, old assets are divested, and regulations tighten. Your SCADA strategy must evolve alongside it.

The Quarterly Review

Schedule a quarterly review that looks at both usage and security.

• Usage Audit: Look at the “Dead” screens. Are there dashboards that no one has opened in 6 months? Deprecate them to reduce clutter. Look at the “High Traffic” screens. Can we make them faster or more detailed?
• Cybersecurity & IEC 62443: As you connect more systems (Strategies #1 and #4), you increase your attack surface. Use these reviews to audit your compliance with IEC 62443, the international standard for industrial cybersecurity. Check your “Zones and Conduits”—ensure that your new mobile tablets are in a separate, firewalled zone from your critical safety controllers.

CSE ICON’s insights on Signs of Software Underuse in the Oil Industry highlight that a lack of regular review is often why systems stagnate. A healthy SCADA system is constantly being pruned and engaged.

Conclusion

Maximizing SCADA system use in oil and gas operations requires a strategic shift from “collecting data” to “enabling action.” It involves more than just buying new modules; it requires a commitment to people, process, and technology by implementing the seven strategies in this article: targeting time wasters, training by role, empowering champions, integrating for predictive maintenance, rationalizing alarms, standardizing workflows, and conducting regular security reviews. Thereby, you build a system that actively drives efficiency. The result is an operation that is safer, more profitable, and ready for the future of digital energy.