Crescent Point | Case Study

OpenTicket

Realize immediate cost savings and process improvement with field ticket automation

Success by the numbers

Cost savings

$2 million

Reduced cost of labor required to enter ticket data and loss from duplicate billing.

Faster invoice processing cycle

8 days faster

Invoice turnaround time reduced by eight days, making it easier to capture early pay discounts.

Financial reporting accuracy

Near real-time spend data

Led to improved cost tracking by operations and engineering

Challenges

Manually keying ticket data cost $1 million in labor per year

Operator lost $1 million in overcharges related to duplicate billing each year

Lack of insight led to spend leakage

Crescent Point was seeking to efficiently control costs through detailed field ticket data. The existing, paper-based ticket process was costly to manage and resulted in long invoice cycle times, masked billing issues, and an increased risk of duplicate or fraudulent billing from the same ticket being billed twice.

Inspiration for change savings in time and cost

The company performed a detailed analysis of their processes that included more than 420 field operations supervisors, drilling consultants and completions consultants, and was able to quantify some of the administrative burdens from field ticket entry and management.

Manually keying ticket data into their reporting system was costing Crescent Point approximately $1 million in labor per year and approximately $1 million in overcharges related to duplicate billing, part of which was directly associated with duplicate tickets.

As an OpenInvoice® customer, Crescent Point had experienced the increased efficiencies and cost savings realized through invoice automation. That led them to explore OpenTicket, a cloud-based digital field ticket solution that enables operators and suppliers to generate, review and approve digital field tickets for faster invoice approvals and payment.

"If you want to compete in this industry, you can't be thinking the same as usual. Everybody's looking for an edge.”

- James Zimon

Supervisor, Invoicing and Accounts Payable
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Solutions

OpenTicket, a cloud-based collaborative platform, enables operators and service providers to generate, review, and approve field tickets.

Implemenation

Crescent Point assigned a task team to roll out the new technology with key suppliers in the South Saskatchewan operations area. The suppliers were contacted via email and offered an incentive of a reduction of 15 days on payment terms for supported invoices submitted through OpenTicket for the first six months.

Crescent Point partnered with Enverus to provide an information kickoff session with the supplier community where suppliers were given instructions on how to use the system and provided with links to training websites. Members of the task team also trained local field supervisors in one-on-one sessions and a task team member was designated to be the liaison with internal users.

"Now when I get asked for metrics, I just click a button, run a report, and it's done.”

- James Zimon

Supervisor, Invoicing and Accounts Payable
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Results

Paper-based field tickets were an obstacle to Crescent Point Energy’s goal of becoming a more efficient, data-driven business. Using OpenTicket to automate the paper-based field ticketing process and connect the field to the office provided significant time savings, cost savings, more accurate billing, a faster invoice turnaround and improved spend visibility at the field level.

Near real-time spend data access improves cast tracking and accuracy

Improved spend reporting and analytics

OpenTicket connects to Crescent Point’s reporting system to provide timely access to field ticket data. Having near real-time data helps operations and engineering track costs much faster and more accurately compared to paper tickets. For example, automatically linking field ticket data to an associated AFE (Authorization for Expense) code provides visibility into cost tracking, allowing Crescent Point to manage projects more efficiently. According to Zimon, “Now when I get asked for metrics, I just click a button, run a report, and it’s done. I don’t have to spend a lot of time compiling information and restarting from scratch every time. You can automate it to where you can load it on demand and get all the metrics you need so you can answer questions in advance.”

Visibility into process efficiencies across the transaction cycle

Easy monitoring of ticket lifecycle

Crescent Point uses the data submitted through OpenTicket to analyze process efficiencies across the entire transaction cycle. They can easily monitor unapproved tickets and ensure prompt approval. Easy access to data and extensive reporting provides a means to measure KPIs such as time between work performed (service date) and ticket submission and the time between ticket submission and approval. By drilling into the results both at the supplier and field approver level, they can identify and address any longer than normal cycle times. Lisa Howland, manager of operations accounting, says, “When tickets were in paper format, we never knew where things were. Now we track all that electronically. We’re saving time, and we’re better able to benchmark and track, and have different KPIs to assess where our bottlenecks are.”

Better contract compliance management

Improving organization processes

Crescent Point’s supply chain team can identify field supervisors that are procuring services or materials that aren’t covered by a contract with the chosen supplier, and that provides the necessary information to evaluate contract compliance (by both the field supervisor and the supplier) and determine priorities for future contract negotiations.

Automatic coding, compliance and reconciliation of tickets to invoice reduced duplicate billing

Invoice process improvements and risk reduction

In addition to cutting the invoice cycle through the reduction in hands on-keyboard time, the automated coding, compliance, and reconciliation of an invoice to its associated tickets reduces the risk of duplicate billing because OpenInvoice automatically identifies and flags an invoice that includes a previously invoiced ticket. “With duplicate billing, it’s really hard to find with paper. An electronic ticket can’t be billed twice,” says Zimon.

As of 2018, over 220 suppliers have submitted more than 75,000 tickets on OpenTicket

Supplier adoption and feedback

As of early 2018, more than 220 Crescent Point suppliers had submitted more than 75,000 electronic field tickets through the system, with many submitting multiple tickets per day.

The response from suppliers has been very positive. With a successful initial rollout and good ongoing adoption, suppliers have embraced OpenTicket because of its obvious benefits to them – its ease of use, the reduced invoice cycle time, and the visibility it provides in the payment process. As Zimon pointed out, “Nothing’s really changed for [suppliers] for data entry, so the wins are that they don’t have to do any more work than previously but now they have more visibility into their tickets. We found that many were waiting for us to go electronic so they could stop with the paper processes.”

"OpenTicket is integral in getting more granularity in the data, having that detail and transparency from the vendor and our field staff. It allows us to better assess where problems are."

- Lisa Howland

Manager, Operations Accounting
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