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Simplifying contract management
THE CLIENT
Our client explores and produces oil and natural gas. Headquartered in Houston, they own millions of leasehold acres North America, New Zealand and Vietnam.
THE PROBLEM
The production company issues millions of dollars in purchase orders to hundreds of vendors each year.
Their legacy purchase order system was based on an Excel spreadsheet template that created attractive purchase orders but did not store them in a centralized location, resulting in a duplication of records over time.
This made it difficult for users to know what category, department or contract term to search for when trying to find a specific contract. The lack of a central system also meant that employees could create purchase orders for services that our client did not have a contract for. This created delays in payment and confusion regarding terms of service.
THE SOLUTION
To solve these problems, Entrance created a centralized purchase order database (PODB) that utilizes Microsoft Access in the front end, with purchase order information stored in a back-end SQL database.
Entrance also de-duped their database, removing duplicate categories and departments. After this was complete, the PODB was integrated with our client’s contract management system.
Now, every purchase order is coded with the vendor name and the type of service being requested. If an employee tries to create a purchase order for a service without a contract, this error is flagged in an exception report.
The system administrator reviews this report on a weekly basis to ensure that all PO’s are supported by the necessary internal approvals and vendor contracts.
Creating the PODB in Access allowed a solution to be created quickly, and very little training was required to ramp up users.
The resulting improvements in record quality and contract enforcement have paid out in less time spent managing PO’s. Improved accuracy also means that customers are billed correctly and pay on time.
Find out more about how automating processes can improve your business.