Stena Drilling: trusted plain-English answers from Maximo

Stena Drilling, an offshore drilling contractor on IBM Maximo Application Suite 9 since 2024, put Interpretos over a standalone copy of its Maximo for ten weeks this summer. In Martin Eklund’s words and ours.

Proof of concept · July to September 2026 IBM Maximo Application Suite 9 Case study · October 2026
425
questions asked in plain English by seven Stena people over ten weeks
44 s
typical answer to a large Analyst question in the final week, across 49 asked
26
Stena-specific rules built during the trial, kept until March 2027
Read-only
no Stena record created, changed or deleted. Interpretos only reads

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

Real data, real users, nothing connected

After meeting us at the Maximo User Group in London, Stena Drilling ran a proof of concept on a standalone environment holding real data, not in use and not connected to anything else. 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. The only change we made to Stena’s Maximo was one read-only data view, which Stena approved. 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.

Which suppliers deliver late?

“Which vendors are late delivering, comparing each order’s due date with the date the goods actually arrived?” The answer joins purchase orders to receipts across every rig.

Are we paying different prices for the same part?

“Which items have we bought from more than one supplier, and who was cheapest?” Compares order history and unit prices across vendors without exporting to a spreadsheet.

Are our contracts actually being used?

“How many purchase orders reference a contract, compared with those that don’t, and which contract items have never been bought?” A check on whether negotiated prices are used.

Which equipment breaks down most often?

“Which assets have the most corrective work orders, rig by rig?” Work history across every rig in one question.

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. Over ten weeks, seven Stena people asked 425 questions.

Four problems Stena Drilling hit, and how we answered them

What they hitRaisedHow it ended
A storeroom lookup timing out20 JulOur defect, two field names wrong for their platform version. Now about nine seconds.
Export capped at the on-screen sampleEarly AugFull export built and shipped inside the trial.
Request-for-quotation analysis failing18 AugMaximo does not expose RFQ through its standard API. We built a read-only path, live six days later; Stena confirmed it the next day.
Big counting questions too slowJul–SepThe Analyst, introduced in the final week, plus a “Dig deeper” button for any answer that stopped short.

A tool for everyone, not only Maximo specialists

“It is an AI tool that we see has a use case for all Stena Drilling employees with little Maximo user experience but from time to time need to extract data … the idea is that it will be like asking a friend in Teams for information instead of logging in to Maximo.”

Martin Eklund · Asset Performance Superintendent, Stena Drilling

One idea from the closing call: specialists use the Analyst for the big questions, 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.

First page of the Stena Drilling case study PDF

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Run Maximo and want to ask it questions in plain English?

Made by Code Development Ltd, the company behind MaxTAF. Interpretos lets anyone ask an enterprise system questions in their own words, learns each customer’s own way of using that system, and only reads data. It runs on IBM Maximo; the same approach has been applied to Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft.