Professional Advantage Infor FMS SunSystems
Industry: Oil & Gas
Professional Advantage has a vibrant and growing community of upstream and downstream oil & gas customers. We have been providing solutions unique to the needs of oil & gas for many years and continue to specialise and evolve our systems to suit the specific needs of this sector.
We recognize each oil & gas company has different needs and can be at different stages; be it a junior focused on small scale exploration and production, to more established oil & gas companies with a wider more varied portfolio of production and exploration assets.
We tailor our solutions to provide a solution appropriate to the stage that you are at. It could be that your greatest challenges are around risks operating in the country of production. Local regulations may impose high compliance burdens around taxation and reporting. You could be struggling with your legal and business structures with multiple subsidiaries and joint venture entities.
Whatever your business pain, we have a tailored solution around complex financial management, AFE budgetary control and reporting, web-based procurement and timesheets as well as tailored reporting and analysis solutions that will ensure you have the visibility of your business at your fingertips.
One area of our experience is Authorisation For Expenditure control (AFE) and the underlying processes unique to joint venture management and accountancy.
Typical problems of oil and gas businesses:
- The sign off of AFEs is too slow and laborious.
- The approval status is not sufficiently visible.
- Your processes lack consistency and compliance across different regions.
- Managing expenditure in the field. Approvals are slow and paper based.
The damaging consequences are that costs can be incurred against an AFE before it is authorised. Could you be left to shoulder the disproportionate cost of a project as a result of poor compliance?
Many companies have difficulty in managing and orchestrating AFE budgets and cost control. Too often, the information crucial to analysing AFE performance is missing. For instance, the rig hire for a drilling operation has increased by 5 days. Operations staff are often aware of this but it doesn’t make its way into your systems. This can cause unexpected and untimely overspend which has to be justified and approved after the fact.
Our AFE management solution manages the whole process from cradle to grave. We manage all aspects of the AFE in an online, real-time environment providing visibility of AFE performance. Management of supplier performance is all on hand and accessed from a browser. For example, a field superintendent is able to conduct an instant search of all orders/invoices made to a particular supplier or item by dashboards and online search tools.
From the initial budget setting phases, authorisations, documentation, business rules workflow and through to approval and insertion into underlying systems of a live/budget AFE, we can ensure you have complete 360 degree view visibility of AFE across all locations.
You gain budgetary and cost control supported by commitment accounting resulting from the electronic procurement capability. This ensures you don’t overspend or over commit.
You can substantially increase the amount of analysis and information at your fingertips.
You can grow your capability with cash flow forecasting and what-if scenario analysis, such as farm-in and farm-out or currency scenarios.
| Problem | Implication | Vision |
| Sign off of AFEs slow and manual. | Work programs delayed. | 30-60% reduction in sign-off cycle. |
| Lack of compliance, inadequate procurement processes. Difficult to manage and monitor in remote locations with limited access to central systems. | Inadequate authorisations, field intelligence not captured in budget systems, no commitments captured. | Ability to monitor and track AFE progress in real time from anywhere. Ability to take action before overruns occur. |
| Compliance issues in relation to sign offs. | Disputes with JV partners, bearing sole cost as operator due to inadequate compliance. | Confidence that all procedures are being followed and can be audited which minimises your risk. |
| Disparate location of information relating to the AFE. | No complete view of AFE results in poor decision making and explanations to JV partners. Image of poor management for operator. | 360 degree view of the AFE. Early warning if spend could breach budgetary thresholds. Decision making with full picture. |
| Dealing with many currencies for domestic, functional and reporting is time consuming and labour intensive. | Month-end delays in reporting, massive peak in manual effort to provide reports. | Automated multi-currency processing delivering accurate, on-demand reports. |
| Multiple legal and JV entities. Multiple equity ownership levels. Multiple geographic locations and local currencies. | Intensive spreadsheet processing and reporting. Month end delays in reporting. | Push button consolidations. |
Inadequate reporting and analysis in current embedded solution. |
Poor budgetary and performance analysis. Lack of cause and effect on KPIs of business. | Deliver a reporting database to extend current accounting solution. |
Solutions
- Infor FMS SunSystems – financial management system
- Infor Performance Management – business intelligence plus budget & forecasting
- iPOS eProcurement – online purchase management from requisition to payment
- XMPro – business process management – including timesheets, AFE process management, HSE, contract management and much more
