Oil rig supplier fuels growth with scalable software

Customized efficiency

A Grant Thornton team worked closely with the company’s technology transformation group to select and implement the Vertex tax engine solution, integrating it with the JD Edwards ERP. “With Vertex, the JD Edwards integration is ready — we just need to modify it for the client’s requirements,” Pili said.

However, the company had complex requirements that demanded specific modifications. Pili explained, “I’ve been implementing JD Edwards for 20 years, and I've been supporting Vertex for 20 years — there are some modifications that are not available. I discussed our issues with Oracle first, to ask if there was a solution. When Oracle didn’t have solutions, we created our own, while still using JD Edwards and Vertex.”

For example, to enable the company’s sales and service-side configuration, the team needed to recognize that taxes were determined by unique location details. “It’s based on the location of the oil rig,” Pili said. “There are so many aspects to that which we needed to consider in the tax calculation. The standard process is to use the shipping address, but we did some customization in Vertex and in JD Edwards to make it work.”

Within service orders, the tax rates on parts and labor are different for different types of service orders. That distinction wasn’t available in the standard system, so the team developed another customization to meet that requirement.

The company’s customers also had non-standard invoice expectations. “Service billing created some challenges,” Pili said. “The standard is that the system only applies taxes on the billings when doing the invoicing — but, before the invoicing, we need to send the forms pro forma to the customers. These customers need to see the tax first, and that’s not available in JD Edwards and Vertex. We added that functionality to let customers see the tax before we invoice them.”

The team combined its customizations with JD Edwards and Vertex capabilities to deliver:

• Geolocation precision that uses latitude and longitude for jurisdiction mapping to handle remote oilfield job sites that lack standard addresses
• Sales and service-side configuration that supports transparent and accurate tax charging across complex customer and exemption scenarios
• Purchasing workflows that verify vendor tax charges and facilitate the self-assessment of use tax where needed
• Customization of Vertex and JD Edwards capabilities to accommodate complex service order tax logic, with additional enhancements delivered via a Grant Thornton development team in collaboration with Oracle
• Process design and documentation to support long-term manageability and reduce audit risk

The new tax technology infrastructure automated workflows, improved billing accuracy, reduced vendor overpayments, and streamlined long-term maintenance and scalability, all within a timeline much shorter than typical ERP-tax transformations. The project was complete within less than a year, with the CFO and controller serving as key stakeholders through the end.