DS-1 VOLUME 4 IS GREAT

DS-1 is great. (That is a perfectly unbiased statement.) Way back when it was written it filled a painful hole in our industry, where people generally ordered “API Standard Rack” inspections on their drill pipe. That sounds good; it sounds official, like I’m going to get a good industry standard working for me.

It just didn’t exist.

Not that API’s standard rack inspection was bad; no, there was no such thing as a “standard rack” inspection or any other kind of used drill stem inspection in any API standard. You might as well have asked your pipe company to hotshot out a unicorn. (Purple mane, please, ideally with some sparkles in the tail.)

So the first edition of DS-1 was meant to cover that weakness. We wrote out exactly what a good inspection needed to cover, how the methods must be performed, and gave the buyer some options as to how much they wanted. Now, instead of saying “API Standard Rack” you say “DS-1 Category 3,” and it really does mean something. (Sparkle ponies are extra.)

Time marches on, and DS-1 grew from just the inspection book to three books when the Third Edition came out in 2004. Volume 1 became the manufacturing specification, Volume 2 was a design handbook, and Volume 3 was now where the classic inspection requirements lived. (Yes, it was, and continues to be, confusing to people that there are multiple books, Volumes 1 or 2 or 3 or whatever, that are all called DS-one).

At that point, lots of users were enamored with what DS-1 was able to do for them, because DS-1 is great (see above). They’d gone from often wasting money when they bought these inspections to knowing exactly what they needed and what they were getting. It had dramatically increased the overall quality of their string, which led to less down time due to washouts and such.

So their eyes roamed over their NPT summaries to see that drill pipe and drill collars were no longer their problem children; now it was things like mud motors and reamers that was causing the grief. Aha! they think. Let’s get the T H Hill crowd to write out a DS-1 for specialty tools! And they make a few calls, gather a few sponsor-company opinions, and bring that request to us: we need DS-1 for specialty tools.

And our answer was … no.

Refusing customer requests seems like a poor idea, but honestly it’s kind of our thing. We have to manage your expectations; there’s no earthly way to write DS-1 for specialty tools. DS-1 is an inspection standard that, with great specificity, instructs the inspector to do this, and don’t do that, and make sure to check this, and leave that one over to the left. There’s zero chance we’d be able to be that specific with even one specialty tool—all that stuff is intellectual property. Plus we’d fill up the world with books if we tried to write out the directions for every different specialty tool that we use in the drilling and completions world. Plus (!) we’d never be able to keep up with it—those tool designs change all the time. It makes no sense, and we’re not gonna do it. It wouldn’t be prudent. (You have to read that in Dana Carvey’s Bush Sr voice, by the way.)

When Fourth Edition of DS-1 came out … we added a book for specialty tools.

You might think the sponsor group just wore us down (and maybe they did), but we managed a specialty-tool book by changing the standard’s philosophy. DS-1 Volume 3 is the ultra-prescriptive, you-must-do-everything-in-this-checklist type of inspection standard. Volume 4 (the specialty-tools book) takes a step back towards ISO 9001 land.

We think of it like this: standards fall somewhere along a spectrum, with “Process” standards on one end and “Product” standards on the other. A product standard is really prescriptive, like the international bolt standards that define the thread forms, the sizes, the gauging practices, the strengths, the testing, the coatings, the markings … all so that when I go to the hardware store and buy a 1/2" bolt it will always work with every 1/2" nut from any other hardware store. Everything is defined and controlled; the manufacturer really has no decisions to make about the bolt. You get quality from control.

The other end of the spectrum has ISO 9001 (and all its other QMS cousins) as the flagship example. If you want an ISO 9001 certificate, you have to do two things: write down what you do, and do what you wrote down.

Real quality people might object to my oversimplification, but I think that pretty well does the trick. You need to have procedures written out that cover every operation or task that needs doing, and all those tasks have to exactly follow the written procedures. Here’s your certificate!

What that gives you is consistency. It doesn’t matter if Bill retires, or Don’s having a bad day, or Christina goes to work for another company. If everyone follows the right procedures every time, you always get the same result.

Interesting fact: consistency isn’t quality (even though it’s usually called a “quality management system”). But! Nobody wants to consistently suck. So when something goes wrong—a customer comes to you with a failure they’ve had in your widget—there’s a built-in push to fix it by changing the procedure. If you fix the problem in the procedure, and everyone always follows the procedure, you never have that problem ever again (theoretically). “Continual improvement” is a big buzzword in Process-Standard-ville.

Now, let’s apply this to drill stem specialty tools. I’ve already argued that a Product standard for specialty tools is a terrible idea, even though that was the original request. DS-1 Volume 3 is, in fact, a “Product” standard, even though it applies to a service, not a product. It’s super-prescriptive with all the variables defined and controlled for the purpose of guaranteeing quality in the result. So “DS-1 for specialty tools” means “a specialty-tool product standard.” And is stoopid.

I really don’t need a Process standard for specialty tools, either, because we already have them. ISO 9001 can apply to mud motors just as well as bolts (or cars, or containers, or whatever—the ISO 9001 standard really just doesn’t care what you’re making). If you want oilfield-specificity, API’s Q1 has you covered in a similar way.

So Volume 4 lands somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t write out the requirements, because we don’t know the right requirements for your tool. But it does force you to have requirements (like ISO 9001), and those requirements have to be good, and they have to cover certain things (unlike ISO 9001).

It’s also important to recognize that it only covers the maintenance processes, that is, inspection, assembly, testing, and use of the tools. The whole idea, prototype, design, manufacture cycles aren’t really covered. There’s a sense that makes our life easier as the authors of the standard—those things would be very tool- and company-specific and hard to write into a public book.

But maintenance is also probably the most important thing from a quality standpoint. If you have a failure in your mud motor, the likelihood that you’ve stumbled on some hidden design flaw in the tool is pretty low. It’s much more likely that the guy that built the bearing stack forgot a bearing, or the inspector missed a crack in the stator, or the operator said “we’re pretty sure that RPM limit is, like, just a suggestion” (happens a lot).

So DS-1 Volume 4 doesn’t give specific requirements, but it forces the vendor to have a clear set of inspection, assembly, and testing procedures, along with clear limits and instructions for the use of the tool. It’s essentially a mad-lib, a template that the vendor follows to make sure that the tool qualification process can be complete and consistent at every point.

Inspection is a good example. (Of course it is, Grant, we know how much you love inspection.) In Chapter 3 of Volume 4 we outline what’s needed:

• You have to break down the full bill of materials for your tool, listing out absolutely everything.
• For each piece-part, you have to list out all the inspections that will be needed. At this point there’s no judgment—if you’re willing to put in writing that “no inspections are needed,” we’ll go with that (until something bad happens because of it). But it has to be listed out.
• For each inspection needed (visual of the seals, blacklight of the connections, dimensional of the internal assembly, etc) there has to be a written procedure. That procedure has to be good, too—we’ve got a whole list of stuff that must be included there if you write it yourself.

• Oh! Then you check Chapter 7.

Ok, so Chapter 7 is special. Historically there were some specialty-tool requirements in Volume 3, largely for the stuff we’re all pretty familiar with (valves, reamers, and such). We know you need to do a ring gauge on your reamer, and a bearing stack measurement on your motor bearings, and so on, so in the Third Edition of DS-1 we had procedures that required those things.

In Fourth Edition, when Volume 4 was introduced, we picked those “specific tool requirements” up by their ears and plugged them into Chapter 7. So in one sense the exact requirements for specialty tools in DS-1 didn’t change going from Third to Fourth Edition. In a broader sense, though, the rules got much more demanding. Third Edition said “you have to do these things—anything else is up to you.” Now Volume 4 says “you have to build the whole structure of your maintenance processes in this way to accomplish all these goals … and oh yeah, you also need to make sure these things are included.”

In fact, that’s probably the overarching theme: there’s an awful lot of burden placed on the vendor in Volume 4 (most of the “you” from the past four paragraphs refers to “you’uns, the vendors providing these tools to the world and thus the ones responsible for making sure they’re good”). Don’t get me wrong, the vendor is the only one that can do it; nobody else has the technical chops to figure out what will create the best results for the users. Still, I like to be sympathetic to the trickeryness of working out how something like Volume 4 applies to their tool and how they can make their customers happy.

So this is for you, operators: DS-1 Volume 4 is great (see above), but it is not the sort of thing you just throw at your vendors and expect good results from. You’uns, the users, need to know what the book says, why, and how your vendors are going to accomplish that. You need to treat it like a partnership, not a spec—Volume 4 is the skeleton that user and vendor alike must flesh out for real-life maintenance and operations.

If you (user) do that, it’ll lead to good things. When you have a failure, you’ll know who to call—not to just blame the vendor, but to understand how the vendor is going to fix that in the future. The partnership based on DS-1 Volume 4 will lower your failure rate over time as repeat failures become less and less common.

Because … DS-1 is great.