Customer Stories

Get Paid Faster With Digital Field Tickets

OFS Company Shortens Ticket Submission to Payment Time From Months to Days

Success at a Glance

Challenges

  • As an OFS company, 51 Oilfield Services looked for ways to operate more efficiently to remain competitive in the market.
  • The company spent too much time managing paper field tickets between its corporate headquarters and a remote customer location, which led to approval and payment delays.
  • The company recognized it couldn’t remain bogged down in paperwork if it wanted to continue to grow the business.
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Solutions

The Oilfield Services Suite field ticket mobile app is an e-ticketing app. Jobs are scheduled through dispatch or created from a blank ticket.

51 Oilfield Services chose the app because it:

  • Allows employees in the field to fill out job tickets online or offline to submit them back to the office.
  • Is easy to learn and use.
  • Optimizes business processes, lowers DSO and increases productivity.
  • Integrates with Quickbooks and OpenInvoice®, an invoice automation system used by a majority of E&P companies in the U.S. market.
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Results

With digital field tickets, 51 Oilfield Services can:

  • Track labor and operations for multiple remote locations.
  • Submit invoices for processing throughout the year.
  • Fix issues faster and avoid processing delays with automatic alerts.
  • Get paid faster—ticket submission to payment time decreased from 1-2 months to 7-10 days.
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Client Overview

Challenges

The founder of 51 Oilfield Services LLC comes from a family that’s been in the oil industry since the 1920s. The company understands the importance of working smarter to remain competitive and are always looking for ways to become more efficient.
The corporate office is in Teague, Texas, but they provide roust-about crews for producers across Texas. One of their customers, a major E&P company, runs an operation in Kennedy, Texas, about five hours away from Teague in South Texas.

With their crews so far away, the company hired a local office manager to manage paperwork at the site. However, it quickly proved challenging to retain someone. Also, the company was using paper field tickets. For this one single customer, the company was submitting around 900 field tickets per month on average.

Below is the step-by-step process the company used to manage paper tickets:

  1. The South Texas office manager would manually enter the ticket information into a payroll spreadsheet, then scan the ticket and email to the corporate office.
  2. The corporate office would then review the ticket, enter it into Quickbooks, print it out, then scan the updated ticket and send the invoice and ticket back to the South Texas office for signature.
  3. The South Texas office would then print out the ticket, track down the company man for a signature, then scan it back to corporate.
  4. Corporate would print the approved copy, then scan and re-enter ticket information for payment to the customer via OpenInvoice®.

For their lease operating expenses (LOE), the turnaround time for paper tickets was one month on average, and for their drilling and completions (AFE) services, it took two months. The company quickly realized processing paper tickets was consuming too much of their time. Besides, the company was looking to grow and provide services to other customers in different locations. It couldn’t remain bogged down in paper if they wanted to expand.

We were pushing way too much paperwork and going through outrageous amounts of paper and printer ink.
Marla Lookabill | Business Manager at the corporate office

Solutions

After 18 months of operating this way, 51 Oilfield Services decided to look into digital field ticketing systems. They chose the Oilfield Services Suite field ticket app because:

  • It worked offline and online. Workers on site could fill out a ticket on their smartphone or iPad, then send it using the cell phone signal on location or once they had access to Wi-Fi.
  • The company man can sign electronically onsite if he chooses.
  • The app was intuitive to use. When 51 Oilfield Services first deployed the app in the field, they gathered the staff together and trained them during a safety meeting. Workers at the South Texas location that spoke Spanish only had no issues learning how to use the app. “If you can use a Smart Phone, you can use this app,” says Marla.
  • The app integrates with OpenInvoice®, an invoice automation system used by a majority of E&P companies in the U.S. market. 51 Oilfield Services recognized implementing electronic invoice submission as an essential part of their plans to scale their business across operators. Because OpenInvoice® has the largest network of operators and suppliers in the industry, it was the obvious choice. With OpenInvoice®, suppliers enter their invoice into the solution and submit it to the customer for review and approval.

 

Soon after 51 Oilfield Services purchased the Oilfield Services Suite Field Ticket app, their largest customer began using OpenInvoice®. The operator saw so much success with the OpenInvoice® software, the company now requires all vendors to submit their tickets through the system.

Results

The company’s ticket submission process is now more streamlined.

  1. After the field worker completes a job, he/she fills out and submits the field ticket to the corporate office via mobile device.
  2. The new ticket goes to the “Completed” folder for the business manager to review.
  3. The ticket is reviewed and moved to the “Review” folder where it’s submitted to the customer for same-day electronic approval.
  4. Usually the very next day the tickets are approved, and the customer can be invoiced for payment through OpenInvoice®.

Every ticket that is submitted is legible and priced. Automatic alerts notify both supplier and operator if any issues need
to be fixed quickly. Often, the approver on the operator side will correct the error and send the invoice on for payment.
The alerts eliminate many mistakes and time delays, and allows for bulk ticket approval rather than having to open each ticket. Also, because operators use spend codes, they can track where they are spending their money. For the supplier, the Oilfield Services Suite app allows them to track labor and operations for multiple remote locations. Workers can even attach pictures to the tickets of the work performed onsite.

Where tickets used to be manually entered three times, once the ticket is created in the field, the information is automatically transferred with attached documents into the supplier’s Quickbooks, as well as into OpenInvoice®, eliminating duplicate entry.

Now that their customer uses OpenInvoice®, the operator and supplier can continue normal invoicing operations throughout the year. Before transitioning to digital invoicing, the operator required suppliers not to submit field tickets from the day before Thanksgiving until after New Year’s Day because the company men were not available to approve tickets. Now the tickets can be approved from home or on mobile.

From ticket submission to payment, 51 Oilfield Services went from 1-2 months to 7-10 days and reduced the amount of paperwork to zero.

Electronic field ticket suite saved us a ton of money in our workforce, a ton of time, and made our customers, employees and bank account happier!
Marla Lookabill | Business Manager

Customer

51 Oilfield Services LLC

Industry

Oil & Gas

Company Size

unknown

Location

Teague, TX

Product Featured

OpenInvoice

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