Frequently Asked Questions

All features added by ofsERP can be accessed with a Business Central Essentials license. A Premium license is not required since ofsERP does not use BC's Service Management module. For the field users, you can use Team Member licenses in many cases, depending on the functionality required in the field.

No. The Service Management module that comes native in Business Central (BC) is designed for scenarios where a service technician needs to repair or perform maintenance service of equipment owned or used by the customer at a customer's location. The module uses separate tables for service orders, service items, and service contracts, and they are only accessible with a Premium BC license. ​ We designed ofsERP extensions to require only an Essentials BC license, by using BC's existing Sales Order tables with different order types for Sale, Service, Rental, and Repair orders. We leverage the existing functionality of Business Central for sales processes, invoicing, inventory management, and reporting. We believe this approach provides simplicity and ease-of-use for our clients, while also delivering powerful features and flexibility. Unlike the Service Management module, we designed ofsERP to handle scenarios, common in oilfield services industry and in construction, where the equipment needing service is not the customer's equipment. Instead, it is the service provider's equipment that is scheduled and deployed to perform a job which must be serviced (repaired and maintained) to continue to provide the expected utilization, rental revenue, performance, and safety.

Many oilfield services (ofs) companies have their own equipment that they use to provide services at the customers' sites or wells. This equipment may include trucks, trailers, pumps, generators, light towers, fishing tools, hoses, etc. Sometimes, they need to send multiple pieces of equipment to a job/well site depending on the services required. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE Field Services solution is mainly designed for repairing or servicing customers' equipment in the field. It is not a good fit for oilfield service companies whose focus is on servicing their own equipment to maximize utilization, minimize downtime, and ensure the safety of their own equipment – which they do through inspections and preventative maintenance. Oilfield service providers need to track their assets from acquisition to disposal and, if desired, calculate depreciation, The CE Field Service solution does not have the capabilities to handle these tasks. Additional reasons why we chose not to use Dynamics 365 CE Field Service for our oilfield services clients: CE Field Service is not well integrated with Business Central. It creates a separate database that needs to be synchronized with Business Central, which can lead to data inconsistency, timing, and performance issues. It is costly to acquire, deploy, and customize. Its design is unnecessarily fragmented with similar data residing in many different tables. This makes it harder to understand and report on and adds complexity and redundancy to the data model. CE Field Service is not user-friendly and has a completely different look and feel from Business Central. Thus, users have to learn two different applications, which is unnecessary with ofsERP. Few consultants are knowledgeable enough about CE Field Service, to set it up, so those that do charge premium rates.

ofsERP is a powerful solution that becomes an indistinguishable part of Business Central; no integration is required. It uses the extension model to enhance the functionality of Business Central without modifying the core code. This way, ofsERP becomes a natural part of Business Central that works smoothly and efficiently and can receive new features from Microsoft without interruption.

Clients with 5 to 400 users and growing are using ofsERP to simplify and automate their workflows, boost their performance, and improve their competitive advantage. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with ofsERP is the preferred software for oilfield service providers of all sizes seeking an all-in-one ERP and business software solution to handle multiple lines of business.