As the impact of Covid wanes, travel and transportation resume, and prices steady, oilfield services activities are resurging, especially in the Permian Basin, and the competition for market share and people is fierce. The unique business challenges the industry faces must be overcome for oilfield service providers to be more competitive.
Compete better and act faster with state-of-the-art ofsERP software powered by Microsoft Business Central and made for oilfield services & equipment rental industries.
Industry Challenges
Tendency to invest in labor first, and ERP technology second.
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Invest in labor-saving software vs more labor:
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Oilfield service company consolidators, backed by private equity and venture capital money, have been acquiring less-efficient, under-capitalized companies and equipment for a fraction of their potential future value.
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They've learned that throwing money at back-office labor during growth periods to feed multiple disparate systems is lose/lose. It provides delayed visibility of performance, doesn't scale well, and causes all kinds of organizational stress when prices decline, and drilling activity subsides. So many are implementing ERP software built for their industry to consolidate different lines of business into a single system, further lowering costs and increasing their visibility and control. These efficiencies and reduced paperwork brought on by technology adoption help them to:
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Achieve more with less labor,
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Increase Visibility,
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Adopt more customer strategies to maximize competitiveness,
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Increase their long-term value, and
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Attract and keep the best talent.
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Contrast this with how difficult and time-consuming it is to try to compete using off-the-shelf accounting software like QuickBooks or other software not designed for service or rental, and tons of Excel spreadsheets to bridge the gap.
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Be more attractive to investors:
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Financial statements generated from QuickBooks and Excel are simply not trusted by much of the investment community, thus investor’s due diligence process often becomes more lengthy and challenging. If other comparisons are equal, such as location(s) and services(s) offered, the 3rd characteristic, that many investment bankers use to differentiate companies, is whether they are using an auditable, known, ERP software that they can trust. (per Jason Wilcox of Wilcox Investment Advisors).
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​Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with ofsERP handles both the financial and operational needs of service and equipment rental companies to help them thrive, while also providing respected, auditable results should they choose to seek outside funding.
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Disconnected, manual processes lead to cascading problems
The complexities of the industry have caused typical oilfield service companies to deploy multiple independent systems and processes (see list above). This results in workflow inefficiencies, mistakes, and more labor costs to handle the duplicate entry or report on the busines performance. These problems began to erode the bottom line even espeically as you grow.
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Further compounding these challenges are the complexities of changing external regulatory and customer requirements. Operators impose their own unique requirements for field ticket and invoice documentation often resulting in still higher admin costs and manual entry into spreadsheets and other silos of data.
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Loss of equipment, tools, and supplies.
Often, it's just tools and smaller equipment that get lost on a job site, but these can still be expensive. Sometimes even large earthmoving equipment is left behind, with no one remembering where it was last used. This can obviously be quite costly. Without an easy-to-use system that provides visibility when something is deployed, moved, and returned, equipment and tools are often purchased unnecessarily, when the same items could have been retrieved from a nearby yard.
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An integrated software solution should provide full visibility of equipment, tools, and inventory supplies at every location and job site, virtually eliminate these losses, and help protect your bottom line.
Fragmented workflows clog up your productivity
For Oilfield services companies, process is number one – and everything should happen in a prescribed order. If financial management, invoicing, field operations and expenses are disconnected from operations, you’re stuck entering tickets manually, resulting in many mistakes, delayed billing and additional clerical labor. The toll on the staff who are busy trying to reconcile silos of information is significant. And routine approvals of billing tickets become a major effort.
The fallback solution has been to enter information into a spreadsheet, one that is not connected to anything. It’s easy to make errors, and hard to keep track of which version of the spreadsheet is the latest. Delays in billing your customers means your cashflow suffers; if you don’t know about an issue until a month goes by, it causes more work for your team. And field tickets that are not discovered until a month later often cannot be billed.
Overcome oilfield services challenges with ofsERP from CBSi
We thoughtfully designed a solution to streamline your work when we developed the ofsERP software powered by Microsoft.
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It’s intuitive and easy to use, like other Microsoft products. –
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Finance is fully integrated with operations
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360 real-time visibility for faster informed decisions to take control of operations
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Cradle to grave tracking of all inventory and equipment
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Fully mobile – stay connected anywhere, anytime
CBSi professionals have an expertise increasing efficiency for Oilfield Service and Rental
Many of our long-time employees have hands-on experience solving the daunting issues you face. We understand the industry and bring years of know-how to improve processes, gain control of inventory, and bill and collect tickets faster. We’ll suggest best practices to improve efficiencies and help you compete better in a fierce market.
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Our people are masters at solving business issues with automation. If you are feeling the sting of disconnected systems, manual processes and the inevitable chaos it brings, we’d love to show you a better way.
