Editors Note: Members of the Ardent ePayables Team (Bob & Phil) recently took a briefing with Mike Donaldson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Oildex to discuss three of their five different product lines (OpenInvoice, Field Ticket, and Oilfield Services Suite), and their plans for the upcoming year.
Company Background
Oildex which is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, initially offered a cloud-based e-invoicing software product for oil & gas companies, called SpendWorks. Oildex’s initial focus was on building out their electronic invoicing network within the oil and gas industry. In 2014 Oildex was acquired by Accel-KKR, a private equity firm that specializes in B2B networks. After the acquisition, the strategy set by Accel-KKR was to expand the Oildex network by acquiring a number of its competitors. This included the 2015 acquisition of ADP’s e-invoicing product line (including the OpenInvoice AP automation solution), the 2017 acquisitions of PDS Energy assets and Phoenix DAS, a provider of integrated field operations management software. Today, Oildex has six offices in the US and Canada.
OpenInvoice
OpenInvoice is Oildex’s AP automation solution. The 2015 acquisition from ADP meant Oildex was able to consolidate its own solution with a competitor that was also focused on the oil and gas space (check our original write-up on the acquisition here). Oildex then merged its SpendWorks product line with the newly acquired OpenInvoice and eventually adopted the OpenInvoice product name. Today, almost all of Oildex’s clients are using the new and improved OpenInvoice solution. The OpenInvoice product itself has been highly optimized for oil and gas. Oildex currently has over 69,000 suppliers registered, with over 8 thousand signed up just last year. It is easy to understand the popularity of the Oildex network for suppliers because they do not get charged to use it and is optimized for the nuances of the oil and gas industry. On the buyer side, Oildex customers are, on average, processing 84% of their invoices from suppliers, electronically. This speaks to the large supplier network and high vendor match rate for companies doing business in the oil and gas industry.
Field Ticket
Oildex’s OpenInvoice Field Ticket, a cloud-based document automation solution, was launched in 2016 in order to help oil and gas professionals out in the field reduce the time between the completion of a work assignment, and the submission and approval of an invoice. For those less familiar with the oil and gas industry, a supplier’s field ticket must be submitted to a customer’s site supervisor, which then must get approved before the creation of an invoice can occur. It is a particularly cumbersome, manual, paper-based process of creating, delivering and approving tickets. This solution helps to automate that process by allowing suppliers to submit their field tickets electronically using mobile devices, and it also enables better visibility to both the service provider and the buyer’s AP department. Field Ticket connects directly with the Oildex OpenInvoice platform which allows for improved data transparency and spend visibility. Field Ticket was originally offered as a module within OpenInvoice, but Oildex now offers it as a stand-alone solution.
Oilfield Services Suite
Phoenix DAS is a provider of integrated field operations management software designed for oilfield suppliers. Prior to acquiring them in 2017, Oildex had been partnering with Phoenix DAS for a number of years. The software suite was designed to help small service providers manage all aspects of their business, from sales, inventory, purchasing, personal, safety, etc. The solution was built so that it requires no documentation and almost no training to use. Phoenix DAS had extensive supplier expertise, and the partnership had been working so well, that Oildex ended up acquiring them in the Fall of 2017. Oildex now has software on both the buyer and supplier side, and is now able to provide more data and increased visibility data all their users. The acquisition also streamlines the entire process, from ordering and dispatching, through the field ticket approval process, and eventually to invoice creation and approval. The Oildex network is able to facilitate all of these transactions going back and forth.
Final Thoughts
The upstream oil and gas industry is unique from many others. A majority of purchases are for complex services, there are extensive joint ventures, millions of fractional rights owners, remote and unmanned sites, and intricate supply chains. Oildex has crafted an AP automation solution that addresses these specific requirements along with building out a B2B eInvoicing network that focuses on buyers and suppliers in the space. Their acquisition strategy has enabled them to grow their network, round out their product offerings, as well as move into oilfield service provider management. Oildex also has a number of announcements planned for 2018, and we are excited to what the future holds for them.
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