With the US Presidential election looming this year, it’s impossible to scroll through the comments section of popular news websites and not see conspiracy theories about a “New World Order” of secretive power elites conspiring to rule the world.
But at LinRich Solutions, the only “secret order” we concern ourselves with is the Order of Magnitude.
We say it’s “secret” because it’s as if only a few people know about it, even though it’s in plain sight every day, manifesting itself in massive project cost overruns and frustrated project teams.
As you may recall from high school, an order of magnitude is expressed as a power of ten. For example, if someone says “it cost me one order of magnitude more” that means it cost 10 times more. If someone says “it cost me two orders of magnitude more” that means it cost 100 times more. Each additional order of magnitude increases by a factor of ten.
Many of us in the oilfield have learned that fixing design mistakes on a rig is very costly. The reason is that costs increase by orders of magnitude as you move along the product lifecycle:
Bottom line: It’s cheap to move things around on paper. It’s very costly to move things around on a rig. So endeavor to do it right the first time.
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