Reading Between the Lines in Exploration and Production Software Guides

With so many available options for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other upstream oil and gas software solutions, it’s common for third parties to produce guides designed to help potential customers evaluate individual offerings to determine which is best for their particular use case. Often, these third parties are consultants who have gained some familiarity with multiple solutions as part of their work, or they’re content creators who have been tasked with attempting to distill complex software into a more digestible form for their audience.

In both cases, however, the published software guide tends to contain numerous inconsistencies or errors, as they are written by someone without a deep understanding of a given product. This has been the case for Enertia in the past, which means that many other software offerings suffer from the same issue. Bearing this thought in mind, we’d like to take the time to highlight some key point to watch for when researching a potential ERP offering.

Customer-first approach to support

One of the most common areas where we see imprecision in guides is in the evaluation of the resources and support available to customers of a particular software. There’s primary hurdle in this instance is that those doing the evaluating are almost never customers of the particular software, which means that their analysis is often extrapolated from their experience collecting information as a reporter. For example, Enertia’s standard operating procedure prioritizes supporting our customers—responding to their questions and requests first to make sure that their day-to-day operations continue to run smoothly and that they’re able to achieve their goals. With our resources weighted heavily toward serving our own customers, rather than responding to journalists or one-off questions submitted to us, it may appear to the authors of a software guide that our support team is difficult to reach, when in reality our support team is focused on assisting our actual customers.

Solutions based on customer size

Guides tend to categorize software and ERP solutions by tier, implying that certain companies specialize in providing software for companies of just one particular size. While this may be true for some organizations, it’s not true of others. As an ERP provider, Enertia is easily scalable, able to suit a variety of customer sizes from non-ops all the way to super-independents. In fact, several of our customers have grown with Enertia, taking their 200+ users and scaling their Enertia experience over time. For even greater flexibility, smaller operators are able to begin using Enertia on an accelerated schedule through Enertia NOW.

Full-scale integration

Guides tend to be generous—if incorrect—with what they refer to as integration when it comes to ERP software. It’s clear that integration is critical for operators, which makes it especially problematic when guides list an ERP solution as fully integrated, even if the ERP uses multiple databases and interfaces. While an offering may outwardly appear to be integrated to an untrained reviewer, the reality is that entering data into multiple interfaces introduces multiple chances for errors, which can have sweeping negative effects on operations. As it stands, even though other ERPs may be listed as fully integrated in some guides, Enertia is the only single-database solution available for the upstream oil and gas industry, which makes us the only truly fully integrated ERP solution on the market.

Open-book sales process

Guides tend to reward ERP providers who produce multiple PowerPoints and rehearsed sales pitches for their review. This makes sense: The guide authors don’t actually purchase the software they’re evaluating, so they consider the polish of the sales process to translate to an onboarded customer’s experience. However, at Enertia, we take a different approach. We think that there’s no better way to understand the software you’ll be working in than seeing that software in action. This open and direct style is often at odds with what consultants are looking for, but that’s because we want our potential customers to get a feel for how they’d be working and be able to see how they would be using it on a daily basis. While may not be what a software guide author is looking for, we think this gives a prospective customer some insight into our working relationship once they’re onboarded: direct, personable, and present.

We know that E&P organizations are sophisticated when it comes to RFPs and that upstream oil and gas organizations put incredibly talented people in charge of vetting a program for purchase. When reviewing software guides, we caution operators to take these results with a grain of salt and realize that not all guide authors have the same degree of technical understanding­—of software and of the oil and gas industry—to adequately convey the strengths and benefits of a particular solution.

Being aware of potential misinformation is key to determining the right ERP software for you. As you evaluate the available options, we encourage you to also collect relevant information from the software providers themselves to ensure accuracy and gain additional context for your decision. In addition, feel free to contact providers like Enertia for a full demonstration to see for yourself how the software performs. You can also read our previous guide to E&P software guides.