Inefficient field ticket and invoicing approval process
Limited spend visibility
Paper tickets lost or difficult to read
Jetta Operating Company, Inc. is a privately-held oil and gas company, founded in 1991, and headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. Jetta operates more than 500 wells in four predominant areas of concentration: Texas Gulf Coast, Delaware Basin of West Texas, Southern Mid-Continent region of Texas, and Appalachian Basin in Eastern Kentucky.
Jetta adopted the Enverus OpenInvoice platform in 2016. Their accounts payable group processes about 25,000 invoices annually. In Q2 2019, Jetta’s corporate team adopted OpenTicket, aiming to accelerate the field ticket and invoicing approval process, eliminate lost tickets, and identify overbilling instances.
Jetta held a conference call to inform their operations groups of OpenTicket. The West Texas area opted to be the first to try out the new system. Areas of focus were their Production and Midstream disciplines, which handled the largest volume of field tickets.
Jetta designated a project manager, a long-time OpenInvoice user from the accounts payable group, who participated in a detailed one-on-one training session with the Enverus implementation team. Enverus then provided one initial session of online training for end-users. The training was relatively short, a one-hour session that focused on system navigation and system fundamentals.
The West Texas operations teams selected an initial group of five to six suppliers to begin using the system. If the supplier had not utilized OpenTicket before, an Enverus training representative would contact them to bring them on board. After the initial group began transacting, more groups of suppliers were brought on and the usage footprint broadened.
As the West Texas operations team gained experience, they developed a set of OpenTicket instructions for suppliers. They provided an email with general instructions that included a link to the Enverus training videos, a supplier workflow guide, and a list of Jetta assets with the corresponding approvers. The workflow guide explained Jetta definitions for OpenTicket fields such as “Lease/ Project,” “Requisitioner,” and “Ordered By.” The operations team iterated through the instructions several times as they were exposed to more field tickets from a wider variety of suppliers.
Enverus implementation personnel visited the West Texas operations area about a month after kickoff. They helped resolve outstanding issues and received feedback related to unique Jetta issues, for resolution with further application enhancements. A local operations tech became so proficient at the application that she could make visits to supplier sites. She could provide training to suppliers that hadn’t been exposed to OpenTicket and reinforce Jetta workflow processes for those that had.
The Jetta operations personnel, while initially somewhat skeptical, quickly came around to the benefits of digital ticketing, particularly the integration with the digital invoice process. One senior foreman, with 30 years of experience in oilfield operations, described it as “mind-boggling” that in eight hours a field ticket could be coded, approved, used as the backup for an invoice, and the invoice then be approved.
Adoption of OpenTicket was very successful. The graph below shows the adoption profile for Jetta, tracking tickets processed and suppliers transacting. By January 2020, six months after production deployment, 36% of Jetta’s total spend was captured in OpenTicket.
Spend visibility achieved 33% faster
Another benefit was spend visibility. Prior to OpenTicket, Jetta would have to wait until a digital invoice was delivered to easily determine accurate accruals. The difference between the service date to digital presentation of the invoice was reduced to 19.7 days, down from 30.2 days, equating to a one-third reduction of time to visibility of spend.
Average approval time dropped 50%, down to 3.1 days
Over this time period, there were 19 field ticket approvers in the system. As they became more comfortable with the system and suppliers better understood what was required of them, average approval time dropped steadily even though ticket counts increased, as shown in the graph below. In January, the average time to approve a ticket was 3.1 days.
Invoice approval times fell 37% for those supported by OpenTicket
Process efficiency is one of the biggest drivers for Jetta’s use of OpenTicket. Invoice approval times fell by 37% with OpenTicket. In January 2020, which saw the highest usage of OpenTicket, the average time to approve an invoice was reduced to 50% of average approval time prior to implementation.
Suppliers gain visibility into the invoice and field ticket process.
Chem Tech Services is an example of a successful supplier engagement. They are a Permian Basin-based chemical solutions provider, delivering products and services to West Texas operators. Chem Tech Services provides Jetta a variety of services, including treatment crews, chemical delivery, and individual well monitoring by technicians. Jetta West Texas operations management sent Chem Tech Services an email, introducing them to OpenTicket. Chem Tech already used OpenInvoice for several customers in West Texas, including Jetta, and was familiar with digital documentation processes. They received further details of requirements from Jetta’s corporate office and then received end user training from Enverus.
Chem Tech has an integrated accounts receivable system, including QuickBooks and OpenInvoice. They were able to use the same system to populate OpenTicket documents after services were provided. The ticket documents were routed to Jetta. Once approved, they were used as the basis for invoice documents in OpenInvoice, with ticket scope and quantity matching between field ticket and invoice at the line item level. About 5% of the tickets were rejected in the initial stages. Jetta had very specific values for defined data fields that had to be matched. When the issues were understood and guidelines were provided by Jetta, there were virtually no tickets pushed back. Chem Tech has seen significantly faster turnaround time between service provision and payment from Jetta since adopting OpenTicket. They have better visibility into the field ticket and invoice process and can handle customer billing issues much more quickly and efficiently. Chem Tech has since adopted OpenTicket for a second customer and anticipates more use as OpenTicket is more widely adopted in West Texas.
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