VistaVu President Jory Lamb participated in the recent SAP Oil and Gas Best Practices
Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Here’s a look inside what some of the industry’s top performers are thinking about.
The best minds and sharpest operators in the North American oil and gas industry are doing more and more with ERP software, focusing on priority areas such as integration, asset management and reporting.
To VistaVu President Jory Lamb, that’s the big takeaway from the four-day SAP Oil and Gas Best Practices Conference held recently in San Antonio, Texas. With VistaVu a leading provider of ERP software and business expertise to oilfield service companies, Lamb was there to stay on top of this dynamic industry’s changing needs.
In his view, the top-three themes of the conference were:
1. Integrated Operations
In one session, SAP’s Ken Lauzon emphasized the gains to be made by integrating operations across key functions such as maintenance, HSE, field ticketing and mobility. In Lauzon’s view, the four steps to setting up integrated operations are: Gather. Analyze. Decide. Implement.
Using maintenance as an example, he said the process looks like this. One, gather equipment performance data. Two, analyze and set up maintenance notifications. Three, decide what maintenance plan and work orders to trigger. Four, implement and execute on the work orders.
“This is very much how we do it with VistaVu Solutions’ Preventative Maintenance solution,” says Lamb, “using tools like unit costing, maintenance schedules, maintenance recommendation reports and ultimately work orders.”
2. Asset Management
Baker Hughes, a company managing $12.6 billion in assets, outlined its approach to capital asset management. As BH senior executive Prasad Bandi explained, true capital asset management works like a wheel.
“In their vision, the wheel turns from capital planning, to asset acquisition, to asset management and back to capital planning,” says Lamb. “Using SAP to bring greater automation to their approvals process, Baker Hughes accelerated approvals from 45 days to four days on a volume of 5,000 capital requests per year.”
Similarly, Lamb notes that VistaVu customers have used SAP Business One and FieldVu to maintain cost-effective inventory levels, achieve full visibility on asset deployment and reduce the need for short-term rentals. These gains create a substantial bottom-line payoff for asset-intensive companies.
3. Reporting
In another session, Melissa LeClair of Schlumberger shared her experiences implementing Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), a tool that VistaVu now offers. By using BPC’s reporting capability, LeClair achieved three important wins for her organization. First, they were better able to scrutinize bad debt expense and thus save the corporate accounting group two days of analysis time. Second, LeClair standardized financial reporting, which had previously been managed independently by different corporate groups. Third, she created libraries of reports on the server to enable better forecasting.
By working with BPC in this way, LeClair provided corporate decision-makers with more timely access to relevant reports, while maintaining ‘cubes’ to ensure only those authorized to use this information could access it.
To Lamb, the SAP Oil and Gas Best Practices Conference highlighted the fact that leading companies know what advanced ERP can do for them, and are pushing the limits of that capability every single day.
“This conference gave us valuable insight into key issues facing some of the world’s largest energy service providers,” says Lamb. “Attending events such as this, and discussing the issues with some true innovators, will allow us to enhance the expertise and the experience we offer our customers.”
