The Week My Purchase Orders Went from Schlumberger to Peanut Butter
On a Monday morning in March 2024, I opened our procurement portal and found two requests flagged "urgent." One was for a wireline calibration service, going to a field crew in the Cooper Basin. The other was for six jars of peanut butter—creamy, not crunchy—for the Adelaide office break room.
I'm the office administrator for a 180-person oilfield services operation in South Australia. We work with Schlumberger equipment and services regularly, and I manage about $340,000 in annual procurement across a dozen vendors. I report to both operations and finance, which means I answer to people who care about uptime and people who care about receipts. (You can guess which group is more forgiving.)
That week, I learned a lesson I should have absorbed years ago: a single procurement system is great for tracking, but terrible for judgment.
What came through my inbox that week
By Wednesday, the requests looked like someone had fed a random keyword generator into our ticketing system. Here's a sample:
- Wireline calibration: A legitimate field-service request for Schlumberger wireline tools. High priority, high complexity, and completely outside my technical knowledge.
- Schlumberger Adelaide training event: Room booking and catering for a two-day session at our Adelaide facility. This one was actually my job.
- A Tiffany watch: The marketing team wanted one as a client gift. I still don't know why someone had searched "Schlumberger Tiffany watch" and ended up in my queue. (For the record: Schlumberger does not make Tiffany watches. The search results are, as far as I can tell, a complete accident.)
- Peanut butter: Six jars. Creamy, not crunchy. The break room had spoken.
- A Millennium Falcon LEGO set: A retirement gift for a field engineer who'd been with us for 22 years. Honestly, the best request I've had all year.
- Hawk identification guide: The office birdwatching club (yes, we have one) wanted a reference book on hawk vs. falcon identification. They'd searched "hawk vs identification" and found nothing useful, so they asked me to order a book.
I'm not a petroleum engineer, so I can't speak to the technical side of wireline calibration. What I can tell you from a procurement perspective is that mixing field-critical orders with office supplies in the same workflow is asking for trouble.
And then the trouble arrived
On Thursday, I got a call from the Cooper Basin crew. Instead of the calibration kit, they'd received a bulk shipment of peanut butter. The local snack vendor had seen "urgent delivery, Schlumberger site" on the packing slip and assumed everything was going to the same address.
I said "field site." They heard "office." Result: 12 jars of peanut butter delivered 900 kilometers to the wrong location, and a calibration service delayed by two days while we sorted it out.
Looking back, I should have kept field procurement and office procurement on completely separate tracks. At the time, consolidating orders seemed efficient—fewer invoices, fewer vendor calls, less paperwork. But efficiency and effectiveness aren't the same thing. (Note to self: write that on a sticky note and attach it to my monitor.)
How I fixed it (mostly)
After that mess, I split purchasing into two categories:
- Field-critical orders: Anything going to a rig site, field camp, or operational location. These now go through a dedicated vendor with confirmed logistics capability. I route technical specs to the operations team before placing any order—not because I don't trust my judgment, but because I don't have the engineering background to verify calibration requirements.
- Office and admin orders: Break room supplies, event catering, gifts, reference materials. These stay with local vendors who understand that "Adelaide office" means exactly that—not "somewhere in the outback."
This isn't a perfect system. For the Tiffany watch, I recommended the marketing team work directly with a jeweler. (That's outside my wheelhouse, and I'd rather admit it than pretend otherwise.) For the hawk identification guide, I just bought it from a local bookstore—some things don't need a procurement workflow at all.
Where this approach breaks down
If your operation spans field sites and offices—especially in oil and gas—I'd recommend separate workflows for field-critical and office items. That's the 80% solution, in my experience.
But if your operation is entirely office-based, with no field crews or remote sites, you probably don't need this split. A single streamlined process could work fine. And if you're ordering highly technical services like wireline calibration or formation evaluation, this gets into engineering territory, which isn't my expertise. I'd recommend consulting your operations team before finalizing any specs.
According to FTC business guidance (ftc.gov), service providers must be able to substantiate their claims with evidence. That's worth remembering when a vendor promises "24/7 field support" or "guaranteed same-day calibration." Ask for specifics—and get them in writing—before you commit.
What I'd tell the next admin buyer
Three years ago, I thought procurement was about finding the lowest price. Now I know it's about getting the right thing to the right place, with paperwork that finance won't reject. The peanut butter incident cost us about $400 in emergency shipping and a fair amount of goodwill with the field crew. It could have been worse.
If your purchase orders range from Schlumberger calibration services to LEGO sets to birdwatching books, that's fine. Just don't put them on the same order. (Note to self: add this to the vendor onboarding checklist.)
This was accurate as of early 2024. Vendor capabilities and pricing change, so verify current terms before you commit.