In late June, Oildex announced that it acquired ADP’s accounts payable automation business, including the “OpenInvoice” solution—for an undisclosed purchase price. The acquisition has two immediate consequences: ADP’s exit from the AP automation space, and a consolidation of two competing solutions with strong footprints in the oil and gas industry.
Oildex has focused on the financial supply chain in oil and gas since its founding in 1999, and has built a solution designed to manage not only electronic invoicing (eInvoicing), but also owner relations and joint interest billing—both critical financial needs for the oil and gas industry. ADP’s OpenInvoice is actually an outgrowth of ADP’s acquisition of DO2 Technologies in 2010, which was another eInvoicing player with a strong focus on the oil and gas industry.
“As a company our business is to connect and automate that entire oil and gas ecosystem; that’s why we acquired OpenInvoice,” said Jennifer Beaupre, vice president of marketing for Oildex, in a recent interview with Ardent. The combined company now has 1,100 customers and more than 50,000 suppliers on its supplier network, with 20 million invoices processed per year across the Oildex and OpenInvoice platforms.
In terms of the product roadmap, Beaupre told us that the current plan is to support both the Oildex and OpenInvoice platforms. Within the next 90 days, however, Beaupre said that Oildex will roll out precisely how they plan to converge the two solutions. Beaupre emphasized that Oildex intends to combine the two platforms into one solution set that will include the top features from OpenInvoice and Oildex under the Oildex brand name.
“It’s not really that we’re taking features from one and adding them to the other,” Beaupre said. “We’re combining them both as much as possible.” There will of course be a transition period; Beaupre emphasized that they did not want to rebrand right away.
Beaupre noted also that Oildex is planning on rolling out a payments solution—the company can already manage royalty checks and joint interest billing, but this new offering is focused on vendor payments. It should also be noted that OpenInvoice includes a payments solution.
Beaupre said that ADP customers do not have to worry about support during the transition as the entire ADP team has been offered the opportunity to retain their current roles in the combined company. Some ADP leaders are now Oildex executives, but other than those few lateral moves, Beaupre said that the entire ADP team is staying where they are.
Given the shared focus of the two former rivals, the acquisition makes sense for both sides—especially because OpenInvoice provides some additional functionality that will strengthen the Oildex AP automation solution in the long term. This addition dovetails with Oildex’s desire to simplify the financial infrastructure of its oil and gas customers through cloud-based technology. Candidly, OpenInvoice was not a great fit at ADP, which is a global leader in the HR payroll and benefits market. The DO2 solution and team never found the right home within the Fortune 500 company and struggled to gain executive sponsorship.
Oildex, however, which has 16 years of experience providing financial supply chain automation to the oil and gas vertical—as well as other companies with what Beaupre calls “complex supply chains”— offers the OpenInvoice team an environment that is 100% engaged and focused on the same things.
We will be watching for the product roadmap Beaupre said Oildex plans to roll out in the next 90 days, as well as the reporting and dashboards that they plan to provide to clients in the next 18 months.
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