When a Genco Energy Services salesman realized a generator belonging to the oil-field-service company had disappeared overnight from a site near Encino, he notified the main office in McAllen.  President Murray Meggison, who started Genco in 1996, called Equipment Deport in Donna which had leased him the generator.  Equipped with a GPS unit, the missing generator was easily tracked to a Hidalgo warehouse and found that day at a freight forwarder, loaded on a stolen trailer with other stolen equipment. 

“We’re getting GPS on everything,” Meggison decided then. “We were having too much equipment lost.  We had a good system, but when you start talking about thousands of pieces of equipment …” Genco’s portable light towers, generators, cooling stations, man-lifts, portable water and sewer systems, and mobile homes, along with countless smaller items spread over Eagle Ford Shale sites  and beyond, were vulnerable to theft and being overlooked.

So Meggison installed the first 250 GPS units coupled with an AT&T system that enabled Genco to track each asset wherever it was. The system recorded how long an asset was at a location and left a “bread crumb trail” when it was moved outside a “geo fence” created for a particular site.

“We are a logisitics company, tracking and moving equipment constantly,” Meggison said. “It’s saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars, because we can move equipment from location to location,” well to well, instead of using a marshaling yard at an office.  The utilization rate for Genco assets rose to 27 days per month.

GPS tracking also simplified and verified billing. Rented equipment no longer got left behind; everything on a site was billed, with the customer having proof of its location.  Banks and insurers appreciated GPS’ asset tracking capabilities. Kent Shepard at Shepard Insurance Agency reduced Genco’s rates.

Then Meggison and Genco were asked to appear in a national AT&T commercial. “The AT&T commercial was phenomenal,” he said.  “I was a little apprehensive when they told me what it would entail. It took them six months to set up. They brought in helicopters and 90 people. The camera rolling time was 21.5 hours to get a 60-second commercial.”

The commercial featured Meggison, selected employees and Genco trucks pulling onto an oil drilling site and circling like a wagon train.  It first ran two years ago during major sporting events, and the impact was immediate. “We started getting phone calls. Wherever we would go – North Dakota, Wyoming, Texas – and say ‘Genco Energy Services,’ people said, ‘You’re the guys with the commercial.’”

It was an incredibly good experience, said Meggison, who had Genco hats made for all the filming crew.

Now Genco has approximately 1,500 GPS units installed with more going on every day.

For more on this story by Eileen Mattei, pick up a copy of the Nov. 2013 edition of Valley Business Report or click on the “Current & Past Issues” tab on this Website.