Stena Drilling: trusted plain-English answers from Maximo

Seven people at Stena Drilling asked Interpretos 425 plain-English questions over a standalone copy of their Maximo in ten weeks. By the end they were confident it was a tool for every type of user, not only Maximo specialists.

Stena Drilling is an offshore drilling contractor on IBM Maximo Application Suite 9, and good reporting on the data had been hard. This is the first case from our own work we can publish under the customer's name, told in Martin Eklund's words and ours. Martin is Asset Performance Superintendent at Stena Drilling. The full case study, approved by Stena Drilling, is on interpretos.ai; what follows is the short version.

The challenge: valuable data, hard to report on

"Stena Drilling Ltd have been using MAS 9.0 since 2024 and have discovered the difficulties in good reporting on the data held within the same. We have tried various methods before, Birt reports, pre-defined queries, and using these in combination with existing AI tools but nothing ever stood out as a good overall solution."

Martin Eklund, Asset Performance Superintendent, Stena Drilling.

The trial: real data, real users, a standalone environment

After meeting us at the Maximo User Group in London, Stena Drilling ran a proof of concept on a standalone environment holding real data, separate from the live system. Interpretos only reads. No Stena record was created, changed or deleted. We made one change to Stena's Maximo, a read-only data view, which Stena approved.

During the trial we built 26 Stena-specific rules that teach Interpretos how Stena Drilling uses Maximo: its custom fields, its rig and site structure, its ways of working. Every answer shows how it was reached and how confident Interpretos is, so a user can check it in Maximo. A data-quality review ran alongside the trial, with each result checked against what the Maximo screens themselves show.

The questions Stena Drilling asked

Each of these needs several kinds of Maximo record at once. Without Interpretos, that usually means an export and a spreadsheet, or waiting for a custom report.

Results: it learned Stena Drilling

Interpretos arrived knowing Maximo, but not Stena. Over the trial it learned how Stena uses Maximo from the people using it.

"Initially it was slow and not as expected and I think we all felt the air going out of the testing and we could not see the ROI. But thanks to a very quick response and engagement by MaxTaf, the system improved very fast and kept improving through the entire POC trials. Now, after eight weeks of trials we are all very confident this is a great tool for MAS across all types of users."

Martin Eklund, Asset Performance Superintendent, Stena Drilling.

Every question Stena's people asked, and every answer they told us was wrong or too slow, taught Interpretos more about Stena's custom fields, its rigs and sites and its ways of working. By the end it held 26 Stena-specific rules. When Stena's specialists said the big counting questions were too slow, we built the Analyst for them. In the final week it answered 49 of their larger questions, typically in 44 seconds, and one query a Stena user expected to take ten minutes came back in about two and a half.

Four problems Stena Drilling hit, and how we answered them

A trial that reports only the good news is little use to the next operator. These are the four problems, and how each was resolved.

• A storeroom lookup timing out, raised 20 July. Our defect, two field names wrong for their platform version. Now about nine seconds.
• Export capped at the on-screen sample, raised early August. Full export built and shipped inside the trial.
• Request-for-quotation analysis failing, raised 18 August. Maximo does not expose RFQ through its standard API. We built a read-only path, live six days later, and Stena confirmed it the next day.
• Big counting questions too slow, July to September. The Analyst, introduced in the final week, plus a "Dig deeper" button for any answer that stopped short.

Looking ahead: a tool for everyone, not only Maximo specialists

Martin's read at the close was that the tool has a use for Stena Drilling employees with little Maximo experience who still need to get data out from time to time: asking in Teams, the way you would ask a colleague, instead of logging in to Maximo. One idea from the closing call follows from that: specialists use the Analyst for the big questions, and everyone else simply asks in Microsoft Teams. The 26 Stena-specific rules are kept until March 2027, so a future deployment would start where the trial finished.