How Digital Platforms Are Modernizing ESP Inspection, Monitoring, and Management in Oil & Gas

In the oil and gas industry, 90% of wells eventually lose the natural pressure needed to flow on their own. Electrical submersible pumps (ESPs), in turn, are one of the most widely used artificial lift systems, efficiently pumping production fluids to the surface. They’re especially helpful in wells with low bottomhole pressure, low gas-oil ratios, low bubble point, high water cut, or low API gravity fluids.

With the ability to handle production rates of up to 20,000 barrels per day, ESPs play a critical role in today’s operations. But since they often work in punishing conditions, manual oversight is no longer enough. To maximize uptime and avoid production disruptions, the industry is turning to digital platforms. In this article, we’ll explore six ways software is modernizing ESP inspection, monitoring, and management across the oil and gas value chain.

Why It’s Important to Monitor Electrical Submersible Pumps

Despite being the lifeblood of production, ESPs do fail, usually when you least expect them to. Across the oil and gas industry, these random failures result in hundreds of millions of barrels of lost or deferred oil production every single year.

When an ESP goes down, it triggers a chain reaction of problems. You’re looking at an immediate total loss of production and a forced well shutdown. The most frustrating issue comes with logistics. You can’t just fix an ESP at the surface; you need a workover or rig intervention. Between the cost of the rig, replacement parts, and the days (or even weeks) of downtime, the bill quickly becomes astronomical.

The good news? ESP failures rarely come out of nowhere. Even sudden incidents usually announce themselves through early warning signs, including:

• Rising motor temperatures
• Abnormal current or voltage behavior
• Pressure and flow instability
• Load fluctuations and excessive vibration

Besides the above, electrical and mechanical issues in induction motors are especially common. Rotor problems account for roughly 5–10% of failures, while stator electrical faults represent 30–40%. In fact, electrical faults overall are responsible for about 61% of ESP failures, and as wells age, the mean time between failures continues to shrink, putting even more pressure on operating budgets.

The math is simple. Catch these proactively = prevent these from happening.

But here’s the gist: manual ESP inspection is a complex task. To examine an ESP physically, you have to pull the entire system out of the ground. That’s a self-defeating strategy that costs more than it saves.

That’s precisely why oil and gas companies invest in digital solutions and IoT sensors. Instead of sending a crew to guess what’s happening underground, ESP monitoring software allows you to:

• Monitor well conditions in real time
• Centralize data and automate workflows
• Handle data analytics for repair scheduling and incident prevention

In short, software helps you move from being reactive to proactive.

Software-Driven ESP Management & Monitoring: What Does It Involve?

Integrating oil and gas inspection software means getting a precise, all-encompassing view into the well and ESP health. Such software connects every part of the process, from a vibration sensor deep underground to a procurement order for a spare part in the warehouse.

1. Real-Time ESP Condition Monitoring

The foundation of software-driven ESP management is knowing exactly how the pump behaves downhole. IoT sensors continuously capture operational parameters (pressure, temperature, vibration, electrical current, voltage, and flow rates) and send this data to centralized platforms.

This provides you with a live view of ESP status: what’s happening right now. More importantly, you can correlate real-time readings with historical inspections, previous failures, and operating conditions. This context helps distinguish normal operating variations from early signs of trouble.

Exoft’s expertise:

ESPs are specialized, but the principles of real-time monitoring are universal. We’ve developed real-time oil rig monitoring software that leverages these exact data streams — different kinds of IoT sensors. By introducing this solution, we’ve helped operators reduce unplanned downtime, nail the perfect timing for interventions, and significantly lower workover costs.

2. Centralized ESP Data Management

ESP-related data is often scattered. Think of numerous inspection reports in PDFs, failure notes buried in emails, photos on local drives, and spreadsheets maintained by separate teams. Digital platforms tackle this fragmentation.

All inspections, failure modes, maintenance actions, and historical records are stored on a single centralized platform. Instead of unstructured files, your teams work with standardized data fields and dynamic inspection forms. Photos, annotations, and reports are directly linked to specific ESP incidents. This is essentially a single source of truth across wells, teams, and partners.

Exoft’s expertise:

When modernizing a web portal for ESP failure analysis, part of our work involved centralizing DIFA documentation, reporting, and analytics. This significantly improved system performance, increasing load speed by 50%.

3. ESP Teams Collaboration

Smooth ESP operation is a team effort. ESP’s health matters to the artificial lift team, reliability engineers, DIFA (Dismantle, Inspection, Failure Analysis) specialists, and third-party vendors for spare parts or repair works.

ESP monitoring software allows all these stakeholders to work in one shared space. You can assign inspection tasks, track approval statuses, and manage changes with full traceability. For example, when a vendor suggests a specific repair, the asset manager can see the exact data that led to that decision.

4. Digital Dismantle, Inspection, Failure Analysis (DIFA)

DIFA is critical for understanding why ESPs fail. Yet, manual, paper-based processes limit the procedure’s effectiveness. Digital DIFA workflows completely transform ESP failure analysis.

Digital DIFA tools guide users through standardized inspection steps and forms, ensuring consistent root cause analysis (RCA) for all teams. Besides that, physical inspections are directly linked to operational data from IoT sensors.

Failure modes, whether electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, or operational, can be analyzed as well. This helps reveal recurring, systemic issues.

Users can upload photos of affected components, specify the root cause, and log the pump’s entire lifecycle (age, past failures, recent repairs, and run-life) into a central database.

Exoft’s expertise:

In the project we already mentioned, namely the modernization of the ESP incident analysis portal, we helped streamline the DIFA process. In fact, ESP inspection is now 2x faster.

5. Data Correlation & Operational Visibility

Once you have enough data, the ESP monitoring software begins to show you the big picture. Platforms correlate real-time sensor data with historical inspections and failure records, helping you associate specific operating conditions with known failure modes.

Advanced filtering and visualization tools enable your teams to generate 3D graphs and reports that show the most common defects, average time to failure, and the components most frequently affected. Dashboards provide an overview of ESP health and performance across fields.

Visual risk indicators, just like the color-coded alerts we implemented in our rig monitoring software, highlight urgency and severity. ESPs and wells can be ranked based on condition, risk, and production impact, helping you decide what to monitor, repair, or replace.

These insights feed into MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) analysis, failure trend tracking, run-life evaluation, and forecasting of maintenance needs, workovers, and associated costs.

6. ESP Maintenance Planning

All the intelligence we just discussed ultimately results in better maintenance planning. Software platforms enable rule-based triggers that automatically alert maintenance needs when defined thresholds are breached (whether electrical anomalies, temperature spikes, or vibration changes).

Based on risk profiles, you can create and assign inspection or maintenance tasks proactively. And with an integrated maintenance calendar, your teams coordinate ESP work with other well activities and planned shutdowns inside a single system.

Moreover, you can compare ESP performance before and after maintenance to audit the quality of the repairs.

Keys to Successful Adoption of ESP Inspection & Monitoring Software

So, how do you introduce oil and gas inspection software into your processes? Successful implementations happen as follows:

1. Start with data prioritization. Review your current ESP data (sensor feeds, inspection reports, and failure logs), workflows, and failure risks. Identify recurring failure patterns and pinpoint which wells are causing the most production losses. Roll out the software to these high-impact assets first to quickly prove ROI.
2. Consolidate data. Establish a single framework with standardized failure classifications, inspection forms, and DIFA records. If three different engineers categorize a “motor failure” in three different ways, your data analytics will be useless.
3. Configure monitoring and alerts. It’s easy to drown in data. Set operating limits and alerts based on known failure thresholds for your specific conditions.
4. Remove data gaps. Connect live ESP operating data with historical inspections, failure history, DIFA findings, and so on.
5. Make insights visible. Use dashboards to turn raw numbers into tangible, traceable results. By visualizing ESP health and failure trends, you can move from wondering what to do to knowing exactly which well needs an intervention.
6. Scale what worked. Once workflows are proven, extend them across additional wells and fields. Train engineering, reliability, and inspection teams.

Choosing the Right Implementation Approach

There are two common paths to adopting ESP inspection and monitoring software.

• Using ready-made ESP software. These work well for standardized setups. However, they have their trade-offs: limited customization for company-specific workflows, potential vendor lock-in, weaker integration with existing systems, reduced scalability to other asset types, and less control over your data.
• Building a custom solution with a reliable tech partner. This approach lets you adapt the platform to your unique operations and standards, avoid dependency on a single software vendor, integrate ESP monitoring into a broader production and reliability ecosystem, retain full control over data access and storage, and scale the solution to cover additional assets beyond ESPs. That’s where Exoft can help.

Conclusion

How can you truly modernize ESP inspection, monitoring, and management? One word: software. With digital platforms in place, you replace reactive responses with real-time visibility, structured failure analysis, and data-backed maintenance planning.

The result is immediate: fewer failures, extended run life, and protected production.

In case you’re looking to adopt digital platforms for ESP monitoring, reach out to Exoft. We’ve got over 10 years of experience building custom, performant solutions for the oil and gas industry.