Alina Parast, senior vice president and CIO of ChampionX, says the oilfield service company has learned to expect the unexpected in serving customers with solutions. Perhaps the only predictability in the supply chain is that unplanned disruptions are almost inevitable.

Parast recently spoke with Nissa Darbonne, Hart Energy executive editor-at-large about ChampionX’s innovations, digitization efforts and its work to help customers lower their emissions. Parast’s complete 25 Influential Women in Energy profile will be available on Feb. 1.

Nissa Darbonne: Alina, we are wondering in OFS, what are areas of innovation that operators most request?

Alina Parast: So especially…in the last few years with a lot of unpredictable events, what operators and customers expect the most for us to be there with our products and services and don't leave them short without our chemistries, with our products, with our skills. So that's what we've been focusing primarily in the last few years. And the innovations happen in how we deliver our products as well as how we incorporate ESG components in our products to continue to be sustainable.

ND: With the supply chain shortage, I would imagine that's more difficult today than, let's say 2019, to make sure the supplies and such are there. Is it getting any better or getting worse?

AP: I think they're always unpredictable events and we've seen it with Ukraine, we've seen it with freeze, we've seen it with some of the raw material. So we always expect unexpected and our team continuously innovates in how we manage our supply chain and it's probably going to continue to have unexpected events and so we are just going to have to be agile and innovative and how we deliver our products and services.

ND: At what rate of acceleration or deceleration do you see the U.S. onshore industry advancing in terms of improving recoveries?

AP: I think that it's diversifying in the sense what they expect from us. So maybe answer differently. We focus on our traditional customers and traditional delivery, but we're also seeing a lot of more demand in the ESG space. So we are complementing our services and products with new and innovative deliveries. So recently we got, we expanded our footprint in emission monitoring. So we supplement what we deliver to our customers with emissions products and services. So in that sense, we see accelerated demand for a diver, much more diversified portfolio.

ND: Is there an example of how your work, ChampionX's work, has made a breakthrough in the field that you can share with us?

AP: So we've been focusing, again, going back to supply chain in addressing some of the challenges and how we digitize our operations end-to-end, touching the customer, touching the supply chain touching our demand visibility. And so it's been we call it digital fulfillment. It's been quite an effort and it showed significant benefits to us. So we have our commercial teams, our supply chain teams, our technical teams involved in kind of creating a circle of life, in a way. We see it from demand. We instantly pass it onto our supply chain team, then we pass it to our technical teams and then we deliver products to our customers and we continuously see end-to-end all the data and progress in that supply, in the circle.