SAP was installed.
It wasn’t used.

Large oilfield services companies live and die by asset availability. The challenge here was threefold: assets moved across borders without proper system updates, procurement and maintenance ran on disconnected workflows, and CapEx planning was based on spreadsheets nobody trusted.

SAP was nominally in place, but utilisation was shallow. Asset Management for lifecycle, Ariba for procurement, Logistics for cross-border movement — all were either underused or actively bypassed by field teams who had found workarounds that were faster in the moment and invisible to the system.

A system of record that people route around is worse than no system, because leadership makes decisions believing it is accurate.

We led the standardisation of SAP Asset Management processes across all business units, then built custom .NET applications to bridge SAP workflows to how field operations actually work: barcode and RFID scanning for real-time asset check-in and check-out, mobile-compatible interfaces for yard teams, and automated alerts for overdue maintenance or certification expiry.

The Ariba procurement flow was redesigned to enforce approval hierarchies and capture vendor performance data. CapEx planning templates were rebuilt against live Asset Management depreciation schedules instead of exported spreadsheets.

And 200+ users were trained across technical, logistics and finance functions — because the workaround culture was the root problem, and no amount of configuration fixes that.

1. Closing the gap between SAP and the yard The reason field teams bypassed SAP was that the standard transaction did not match a person standing in a yard with a machine. Barcode and RFID capture made the compliant path the fastest path, which is the only durable way to change behaviour.
2. Cross-border asset movement Equipment crossing six national borders creates customs, certification and tax exposure if the system does not reflect physical location. Making movement a tracked, enforced process materially reduced regulatory risk during inspections.
3. Making finance trust the asset register CapEx planning only accelerates if finance believes the depreciation and condition data. That trust came from traceability — every asset’s location, maintenance status and certification visible and current in one system.
4. Six years of sustained change, not a project Programmes like this fail after go-live, when the consultants leave and the workarounds return. Sustained adoption came from continuous process ownership rather than a handover document.

Full traceability for 5,000+ assets across six countries — location, maintenance status, certification and depreciation all visible in one system. Cross-border movement compliance improved substantially, reducing regulatory exposure during customs inspection.

CapEx planning cycles shortened from three months to three weeks, because finance could pull live asset data instead of chasing spreadsheets from each department. Procurement cycle times fell through Ariba automation, and vendor spend became auditable for the first time.