ERP Software

Oil and Gas ERP Software

Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP applications are software systems that keep track of virtually every aspect of a business. ERP software applications are utilized to manage everything from purchasing, inventory warehousing, and materials to shipping and accounting. They can even handle invoicing, customer relations management, and human resources management.

ERP software is often complex, but this is particularly true in the energy, utilities, oil, and gas industries.

Compared to other industries, Oil and Gas companies are distinctive in that they involve complicated and diverse requirements. For example, these companies require fixed asset management, work management, field service management, geographical information systems, and trouble management -in addition to most other, more typical, business functionalities.  Most ERP software solutions cannot integrate and handle these diverse needs, so trying to find an ERP Software System capable of effectively managing all of these areas represents a true challenge.

There are four topic areas that an Oil and Gas Company should look at in order to tackle this challenge with some assurance. First of all, a business shopping for Oil and Gas ERP Software needs to examine enterprise asset management due to the fact that energy companies are asset intensive. The ERP software has to be able to keep track of the production, repairs, and costs of these assets.

Oil and Gas companies rely on geospatial data in order to manage inventory, field service crews, exploration, etc so this is the second area to be investigated when purchasing ERP Software.  In the end, it will help avoid the need later for GIS add-ons.

Work management and field service management represent the third topic area since they are key functions for an oil and gas company. These energy companies also need to manage work orders for new assets, keeping up with repairs, and setting up new service for customers. Complicating the process further, these work orders have to tie in to the asset management, mobile workforce management, and customer systems.  Moreover, there has to be integration with customer service, billing, and account management as well as with outage management and work management processes.

The fourth topic area is outage management. Outages are difficult to deal with from every perspective so ERP software must be able to track trouble areas where these systematically occur.

It is important to note that not all Gas and Oil Companies are alike. Therefore, to choose the most correct ERP Software it is essential for energy companies to plainly define their operational needs and how these make them unlike other energy companies. 

Written by :

Amy Cruz