BLACK HILLS BENTONITE
“We expect that Business One will streamline our month-end processes and give us time to do other projects as well.” Tammy Keeran, Controller, Black Hills Bentonite
The oil and gas industry depends on the drilling gels this company mines and produces. With SAP Business One on their side, the future looks bright.
A company’s accounting staff doesn’t typically look forward to their annual visit from the auditor. While necessary and important, audits have a way of making life just a bit miserable for a short period each year.
When the company auditing Black Hill Bentonite’s 2008 books recently ran into Tammy Keeran, they had this to say.
“They said they were very pleased with the improvements we’ve been making,” says Keeran, the company’s Controller. “For us, we have been very pleased with Business One implementation, and the auditor’s comments were another sign that we’re on the right track.”
Based in Mills, Wyoming, Black Hill Bentonite mines and produces a wide variety of materials used by the North American oil and gas industry, such as drilling gels. In recent decades, the company has made it a practice to overhaul its business software systems every 10 years or so. By the time the most recent 10-year period arrived in 2008, the legacy system was clearly showing its age.
One problem was that the system didn’t provide enough functionality to monitor and manage sales and inventory. Another was that the legacy system was being used by fewer and fewer companies, making qualified service providers hard to find and costly to use.
To assess which system would meet its changing needs, Black Hills Bentonite approached VistaVu Solutions. With operations in Houston, Denver, and Calgary, VistaVu has emerged in recent years as a leading business software firm serving the oil and gas services industry.
Disciplined scoping process
For VistaVu Implementation Manager Alex Waddell, what stood out with Black Hills Bentonite was the company’s willingness to look broadly at all available solutions.
“Regardless of the size and scope of the project, we follow a 15-step process,” says Waddell. “First, we develop a scoping document. BHB asked us to perform the scoping exercise on a fee basis. Essentially, they were paying us for informed, unbiased advice on what they should do next.”
In the spring of 2008, this scoping exercise produced a strong recommendation to implement SAP Business One. SAP Business One is an integrated, affordable business management software platform specifically created for small and medium-sized businesses. SAP Business One allows companies to simply and easily automate the functions that make their business work, from operations to sales to HR to manufacturing to purchasing to finance and more. Because its interface is simple and intuitive, staff can learn the ropes in no time flat.
“We knew this would be a much easier application to use,” says Keeran, “and we liked having integration with Excel, so we could transfer data from Business One to Excel easily.”
Up and running in months
As Waddell explains, part of the genius of SAP Business One is its capacity to integrate data from different corporate functions. What’s more, companies can pick and choose the modules they need, and hold off future purchases until the time is right. SAP Business One modules chosen by BHB include the Financial Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Banking and Customer Relationship Management. VistaVu also assisted in the transfer of data from a third party payroll module.
By the fall of 2008, BHB was ready to implement Business One, with Waddell taking the lead from the VistaVu side. Significantly, much of the implementation can be done remotely, which minimizes disruption to the company’s day-to-day activities.
In the end, BHB chose to implement Business One on the production and accounting components of its business, with Waddell training five users in the system’s operation. The system went live at the end of 2008.
In Keeran’s view, the skill set Waddell brought to the table was instrumental in achieving a relatively smooth transition to SAP Business One.
“Alex is not only knowledgeable about Business One, but he knows accounting as well,” she says. “That was a huge help.”
Waddell describes himself as a ‘hybrid’ – part accountant, part IT professional and fully committed to the client’s success. “My role is to bridge the gap between the software and what the client needs the software to do,” he says.
Immediate improvement apparent
In Waddell’s view, the BHB implementation is a fine example of what happens when the right software solution meets the right organization at the right time.
“I really believe that Business One is a solid product, with great features and great drill downs that make it an excellent fit for a mid-sized company like BHB,” says Waddell.
With several months of financials under their belt, BHB can already see the difference that SAP Business One makes. In Keeran’s opinion, the best example of this is the new ease with which sales and inventory can share information.
“We have much better command of sales orders, tracking orders and open orders,” she says. “We couldn't do that at all before and now we can do it 100%, so we have been very happy with that.
“I’m excited now, but I will be more excited two or three years from now. We expect that Business One will streamline our month-end processes and give us time to do other projects as well.”