The accounting team at TPIC was spending too much time doing manual and repetitive tasks to close out the month and generate regular reporting packets for management. Having worked with us in the past, they asked us to streamline the process.
We promised them we’d make the process as fast and as simple as possible, joking that it would be as easy as pressing a button, and now it is!
A process that used to take days now only takes a few minutes, and all the manual labor has been reduced to a single button press, literally.
About TPIC
TPIC, the second largest oil producer in Louisiana, has a huge presence in the Gulf Coast regions of Louisiana and Texas. We have worked with the organization for several years and the team there already uses Productioneer for several processes including data capture, allocations and production reports.
With dozens of field offices, TPIC is a huge operation. Time is of the essence and processes need to be as streamlined as possible.
The accounting team already used OGSQL from OGSYS for accounting and Aries for forecasting* but the team still had to allocate many man-hours every month to manually complete month-end reporting processes.
Pain Points
With over 5,000 wells, 75 oil fields, two business units, and several districts in each business unit, month-end closing was a mammoth task. Accrual estimation was a manual, labor intensive process and the actual data was always around two months behind.
The company’s financial reports were prepared manually in Excel and PowerPoint, and up to 100 labor hours were allocated to every quarterly financial report.
The Challenges
With such a diverse range of locations, TPIC’s field tickets came in all shapes and sizes. There was no centralized process for reporting data, and the pure manual effort it took to compile reports was unsustainable.
Compiling financial data from the accounting system’s tabular output format into regular reports was a manual process and in addition, some aggregations and custom roll-ups weren’t supported by the accounting system in use at TPIC – more manual jobs.
And what happened if there was an error? It all had to be done over, manually.
The Mi4 Solution
First off, we needed to get all TPIC’s ducks in a row with a much simpler and centralized data collection system within Productioneer. Each field location was given access to submit the data in a standardized way. The AFEs (Authorization for Expenditures) were integrated with OGSQL and used to generate a monthly report, ready for use in the accounting system.
Next, we turned the month-end closing tasks into a single automated workflow which consists of many steps including posting ceases, database backups and restores, data transformation and report generation. This process uses integration and transformation pipelines to feed data from different sources into a reporting database model that is user friendly and easy to read. It also allows us to create custom aggregations and roll-ups with multiple hierarchies.
Financial reports were created using Productioneer to eliminate manual editing of Excel and PowerPoint reports and automated the electronic report distributions to stakeholders. This helped to facilitate reviews and provided interactive reports instead of hard copies – we were saving trees too!
Finally, we wrapped the whole thing into a One-Click Process – there’s more about that nifty little gadget in my next blog post.
The Outcome?
I can honestly say that without Mi4, our financial reporting would not be as detailed, accurate or timely…
Carol K. Financial Reporting Manager, TPIC
Well, everyone’s a winner.
Stakeholders now receive and review electronic drafts of the reports before they’re finalized, and the reports are interactive, with drill through, drill down, and search capabilities.
The entire process is now operated with a single button click and takes less than one hour from start to finish – a huge improvement on the hours and hours of manual labor of the previous process.
Corrections and revisions add only about an extra hour of waiting while the process runs again – leaving TPIC’s accounting team to kick up their heels and head out for their own happy hour.
Cheers!
* The OGSYS and Aries brands are tradenames – Mi4 is in no way affiliated with these companies