Customer Stories
Maintain a High OpenContract PriceBook Compliance Rate
Discovery’s accounting team was suddenly faced with reduced staff and an invoice volume that had not decreased. In addition, the company had 120 active price books to maintain. Given the current volatility in the oil and gas industry, maintaining frequent price changes was becoming a challenge. The company did not want to sacrifice their current OpenContract PriceBook program due to the staff reduction, and wanted to continue to grow the program.
OpenContract PriceBook, when used with OpenInvoice® and OpenTicket®, allows operators and suppliers to upload contract price agreements, catalogs or simple rate sheets to validate inbound electronic invoices and field tickets. Users also see line item detail, automated workflows with reconciliation and spend analysis reporting to help control leakage.
Discovery had maintained an average OpenContract PriceBook compliance rate of 90%, but their compliance maintenance process was labor intensive—they were spending three to five hours a week working yellow OpenContract PriceBook alerts. A yellow alert occurs when the line item on the ticket or invoice can’t be found in the referenced price book (“Off Contract”). This results in the line item needing to be manually validated and additional follow-up work with the supplier to update the price book with the missing item. With reduced staff, manually managing the alerts was taking up too many hours
Decrease Invoice Touch Points for AP and Approvers
Given the company-wide staff reduction, Discovery was also looking to decrease invoice touch points for both AP and approvers. AP was coding electronic field tickets and then manually verifying the coding and routing the invoices to an approver. Approvers then reviewed both the electronic field tickets and approved the invoice. The company needed to reduce these duplicate touch points.
Approximately 100 of Discovery’s vendors were utilizing OpenTicket®. OpenTicket® is a digital field ticketing system that empowers operators and suppliers to generate, review and approve digital field tickets for faster invoice approvals and payment. The company began using OpenTicket® to process low-value water hauling tickets faster. First, Discovery built a program to utilize their dispatch center data and OpenTicket® functionality to auto-code and approve these tickets. Next, they focused on converting their LOE vendors to electronic field tickets. Paper field tickets were taking an average of 20 days to be invoiced, making it harder to monitor LOE spend. By implementing electronic field tickets Discovery now has visibility into LOE spend in seven days. Before the staff reduction, the company had a full-time resource dedicated to expanding their electronic field ticket program to include frac and drilling vendors. The company’s long-term vision was to use coding from Wellview and Siteview to code electronic field tickets. This would eliminate a duplicate touch point that was taking place at the field level.
Looking for a streamlined, accelerated implementation, Discovery contacted the Enverus Professional Services team to implement these improvements into its current workflows. The team is a group of technology experts with deep knowledge on all Enverus Business Automation solutions. The Professional Services team assists operators and suppliers to implement Enverus technologies, ensuring maximum return. The team can also assist with training and onboarding as they understand the operator and the vendor views of the applications. With a network of more than 400 operators and 98,000 suppliers using OpenInvoice®, Enverus team members have established relationships across the industry. The services are ideal for any operator looking to efficiently implement new Enverus technology into their tech stack, experience higher adoption and faster onboarding, and maximize ROI on their technology investments.
The Professional Services team assisted Discovery to:
1. Utilize OpenInvoice® Functionality to Systematically Enforce Compliance
The Enverus team helped Discovery utilize system functionality to enforce compliance while reducing time spent manually reviewing alerts. First, the team did some clean up that was needed before the process could be implemented. They then set up the requirements and launched the new workflow within three days. Discovery’s team was able to remain focused on processing invoices during this time, continuing their work uninterrupted.
2. Improve OpenContract PriceBook Collaboration
Discovery also struggled with the amount of time spent maintaining price books. The Enverus team suggested training more vendors on price book collaboration — a time-consuming task. Although Discovery knew this would save time in the long run, it didn’t have resources to spend the time needed to train vendors. The Enverus team trained vendors with the highest volume of price book changes on collaboration. The team also helped Discovery analyze which vendors needed to be trained and which vendors were already collaborating with other companies. This was invaluable information Enverus provided to Discovery that it otherwise would not have known.
3. Implement Work Flow Automation
Discovery needed to reduce the number of times an invoice was touched by both AP and approvers. Because the company had set up 100 vendors on OpenTicket® and had 127 price books, they were able to leverage OpenInvoice® workflow automation to code and approve invoices systematically. The Enverus team quickly established workflow automation rules, resulting in 400 (40%) of the company’s invoices being auto-coded and auto-approved within the first month. The company estimated a weekly time savings of approximately 30-50 hours across the company because AP no longer codes and routes these invoices for approval and the approver no longer needs to approve invoices when they had already approved the ticket.
The Enverus team began training vendors on OpenContract PriceBook. With several suppliers needing OpenContract PriceBook changes, having the extra support Enverus provided was valuable. There were a couple of suppliers who remained skeptical during training and implementation, but Enverus’ relationships helped smooth these situations. Discovery found their vendors were willing to work with them, crediting this to relationships built by Enverus. In one instance, a vendor struggled to connect to OpenContract PriceBook and an Enverus expert called the supplier directly to help them connect.
The team also helped Discovery onboard suppliers by highlighting how the change would help their business. Discovery told water haulers that they must use OpenTicket® and OpenContract PriceBook. If Enverus set up the supplier’s price book, prices prepopulate, so correct invoices can be submitted faster. If the supplier also utilized electronic field tickets, they no longer had to chase down paper tickets. This would allow for faster invoice submission which meant faster payment. Now invoices with green price book and green field ticket alerts are approved the same day they are submitted. Manually approval of invoices would take an average of three days.
Within two days, the Enverus team implemented the auto-code/auto-approval workflow. Discovery started noticing improvements immediately because the AP team no longer touched those invoices at all; 400 invoices were auto-approved in the first month. Candace estimates time savings of 30-50 hours per week by not having to touch these invoices — the equivalent of one full-time employee’s hours.
Discovery plans to continue to leverage OpenInvoice® and OpenContract PriceBook to build out robust reporting so the company can get real-time flags on pricing to report to operations before price change approval. When asked how she would describe working with the Enverus Professional Services team and the changes they made for Discovery, Candace says, “It’s lifesaving and invaluable because they removed the stress of a heavy workload due to less resources. The knowledge they were able to give us, we wouldn’t have known on our own. It would have taken us a month or longer to get where they got us in two days.”
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