The coding team went from 24 people to five while invoice volume doubled to 60,000 per month.
A Plateau at 50 Percent and a Growing Volume Problem
Devon began automating out of necessity during the industry downturn that started in 2016, when the team had to do more work with fewer people. An early effort built on robotic process automation and a non-Enverus workflow system carried the company only so far. By the 2018 to 2021 period, Devon had hit what the team describes as a brick wall at about 50 percent automation, and it was clear that ceiling would not scale with a company that intended to keep buying and growing.
At the same time, a large share of field activity was still manual. AFE work in particular meant physically signing tickets in the field, writing cost coding by hand and sending documents off to vendors. That created safety concerns for people flagging down approvers on remote lease roads, and slowed the approval cycle and pulled technical staff into administrative work. Devon’s operations teams began pressing for a better system, which set the search in motion.
A Connected Platform, Rolled Out One Category at a Time
Devon returned to OpenInvoice in 2021 and then layered on the rest of the Source-to-Pay portfolio over the following years, adding OpenTicket, OpenContract PriceBook and RFx. Rather than switch everything on at once, the team rolled OpenTicket out category by category, starting with water hauling and disposal, then expanding into other service work as field feedback came in.
The larger move was bringing all AFE work onto OpenTicket in 2025. Devon replaced manual field signatures with the financial authority signature captured directly in OpenTicket, which removed a duplicate step and reduced the paperwork burden on approvers. The rollout leaned heavily on structured office hours before and after go-live, run for both internal Devon staff and hundreds of vendors, so that questions could be answered live rather than through repeated email threads. Because many vendors were already using OpenTicket for other operators, onboarding was less about starting from scratch and more about confirming that Devon used the system the same way everyone else did.
On the pricing side, OpenContract PriceBook gave the supply chain team a clearer way to manage pricing exceptions, flagging items that came in off or below the agreed price book so they could be caught and handled. That kept accounts payable out of pricing decisions and helped keep line-level compliance high. For coding, Devon chose to map item text to GL accounts itself rather than hand that control to the field, which kept coding consistent while still capturing the automation benefit at the ticket level.
For Devon, real automation meant the system doing the work, not simply shifting manual coding from the accounting team onto the field. Operations teams review tickets in OpenTicket but do not code them, and the accounting team now focuses on the exceptions that fall out.
More Volume, Far Less Manual Work
The connected platform changed the shape of the work. Suppliers on OpenTicket grew from 617 to 1,632, and invoice volume coverage rose from 40 to 84 percent. As OpenTicket fed cleaner, coded tickets into OpenInvoice, Devon’s automation metrics moved past its internal best-in-class benchmarks: auto code verify climbed from 40 to 72 percent, auto approve from 70 to 79 percent and zero-touch invoices from 38 to 57 percent. Together the team estimates these gains contributed roughly 48,000 hours of saved approval and coding time annually.
The staffing math tells the same story. When Devon started this journey in 2016 it had 24 people coding invoices. Today it has five, even though monthly invoice volume has doubled from about 30,000 to 60,000. The coding team’s role shifted from processing every document to handling exceptions and maintaining the item-text mapping that keeps the automation accurate.
Automated ticket validation added another layer on the highest-volume ticket types. Of roughly 60,000 tickets a month, about 12,000 are water hauling. By pairing OpenTicket with geofencing, cost-object mapping and pre-set validation criteria, Devon reached auto-validation rates near 90 percent in one of its offices, taking thousands of routine tickets off its team’s plate and, as Nick describes it, getting people out of administrative work and into the real work.
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OpenInvoice, OpenTicket, OpenContract PriceBook.
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