Microsoft Great Plains serves the wide spectrum of horizontal markets.  Great Plains could be considered as ERP platform, which you could expand with third party modules or advance with your own in-house custom functionality.  The best approach would be reasonable and balanced combination of existing modules and new custom logic.  In this small article well give some highlights on Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains implementation and setup in Oil & Gas industry, especially for companies, specializing in off-shore platform installation and drilling.

• Fixed/Production Assets.  Crude oil and gas production is a highly asset intensive activity, all the assets: wellheads, drills, offshore platform itself, etc. must be regularly and appropriately maintained. No wonder, that petroleum production is 24x7 with minimal downtime for repair, to maximize output produced and to minimize costs.  In Microsoft Great Plains you can utilize combination of Fixed Assets module, where you depreciate your large assets such as platform itself plus Great Plains Manufacturing with the emphasis on Capacity Resource Planning.  Considering that it is not a real manufacturing, but rather allocation of your production assets and time you could use Great Plains Project Accounting just to allocate resources, or even Great Plains Dexterity customization to serve resources allocation and assignment to the cost centers
• Logistics.  Oil & Gas production is under the strict safety and environmental standards and requirements at the company, industry and governmental levels. These requirements imply best practices and efficiency in logistics, from procurement of materials to the receipt of those materials at the relevant wellsite - the right materials, right on time, at the right location.   In Microsoft Great Plains you use Inventory (IV), Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order Processing (POP) modules to automate your Logistics via Barcoding, automated shipping/receiving, etc.  You combine these technologies: Great Plains Dexterity, VB/VBA (Barcoding reading and uploading to GP), MS SQL scripting, .Net web publishing.
• Production Phases.  Drilling, Water/Gas preparation for injection, oil processing, cleaning, leaks monitoring these could be set up as phases in your light manufacturing or project accounting module.  You will need custom logic to be implemented in Great Plains Dexterity.
• Market Size.  Estimated number of offshore drilling platforms worldwide is about 7,000.  Current trend is total expenses reduction, which in turn encourages companies management to revise ERP efficiency and cost plus analyze the evolution in computer technologies.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support.  Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR