Velocity Insight attended the virtual Enverus Spark 2021 online conference late last month. The event was free and offered almost 30 sessions to choose from to learn more about Enverus Business Automation solutions. The sessions were recorded and are now available for attendees and non-attendees here. While the majority of conference attendees were finance, accounting, and supply chain professionals, the Business Automation solutions touch almost every part of the oil and gas value chain. I have been acquainted with Enverus Business Automation solutions for over a decade (when they were known by a different name) from the both the E&P side and OFS side in operational and supply chain roles. Here are some key insights from the conference, but first…
What are Enverus Business Automation solutions?
Enverus Business Automation (BA) solutions are focused on solving challenges for the source-to-pay (S2P) cycle and back-office operations. For E&Ps, these solutions are broken into two main buckets: Payables and Supply Chain (OpenInvoice, OpenTicket, Pricebook, OpenOrder, OpenInsights, JIBFlow, etc.) and Joint Venture Accounting & Mineral Management (EnergyLink, MineralSoft, etc.). There are also Supplier Solutions that can provide tools for efficiency and impacts for a supplier’s cash conversion cycle. Anecdotally, the Enverus BA suite is very likely the market share leader for several of these categories, so it’s an important group of tools to watch. Enverus appears to be making a play to use their market share strength with the OpenInvoice and EnergyLink platforms to cover the full source-to-pay cycle.
Key Takeaway: Implementing tools to digitize your supply chain in service of automating your business processes can be a game changer, and Enverus has a suite of tools intended to make this happen. Implementing business automation in any form can be a heavy lift in terms of workflow modifications and change management, but if it can be done there is a treasure trove of value that can be unlocked. Solutions like Enverus’ BA suite provide the bridge to collecting and using data to fully automate processes, provide effective cost monitoring and reinforcement, and deliver analytics that can be an invaluable tool for operational insights and higher quality decision making.
Other Takeaways and Themes:
1. Digitizing your supply chain to automate your business processes can be a daunting prospect, so learning from the experiences of others is invaluable. The most impactful sessions from the conference were the ones that featured actual customer experience. Here are a couple of sessions that highlighted this concept. This session entitled “Reduce Manual Approvals with Touchless Invoice” features experience from Pioneer Natural Resources, BPX, and Discovery Natural Resources. Devon Energy shares its experience with different procure to pay P2P platforms here. In another interesting session, Pioneer again shares their experience as a first adopter of the collaboration between Enverus and Peloton (WellView) detailed in this session “Accelerating Invoice Auto-Approvals with WellView/Ticket Integration”.
2. Some Enverus tools are mature, like the ubiquitous OpenInvoice platform, and there are some solutions still in development, including OpenTicket Mobile and Smart Contracting. OpenTicket Mobile is an extension of OpenTicket that eliminates the back office manual entry (and appears to be a direct competitor for ENGAGE and a couple other field ticketing solutions). Enverus looks to have a first version available by Q4 of this year. You can access that presentation here. Another product in development for transforming the S2P cycle is Smart Contracting (Pricebook) which has been developed in conjunction with Marathon. This tool integrates MSAs, contracts, and Pricebooks, and will also provide tools to analyze things like the cost impact of contract changes.
3. Enverus Business Automation solutions are tackling many portions of the oil upstream oil and gas value chain. They offer OFS value-added services like OpenTicket Mobile (coming Q4 2021), TicketLink (coming 2022), and SupplierLink (currently available). Enverus also provides solutions for joint interest billing through JIBFLow and uses EnergyLink to automate the joint venture and owner relations business processes. Continental Resources shares their experience with JIBFlow here. You can learn more about EnergyLink here.
The Enverus Spark 2021 conference provided a comprehensive look into the Business Automation solutions Enverus offers for the S2P cycle and back-office operations. Business automation solutions (whether Enverus or other) are sometimes the forgotten frontier for efficiency and cost savings opportunities at E&Ps. If they are not part of your digital roadmap, we strongly suggest that you consider them. If you don’t know where to start or need help in your change management journey reach out to us. We are here to help!