Oil & gas engineers link ERP system to M-Files

When Nanco Eelman and Richard Keijser started Dutch Seperation Engineering (DSE) Oil & Gas, an ERP system was the first thing they purchased. They knew that an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application was important for planning and managing the financial details of the projects, yet even then they foresaw that they needed more.

"We are a young company. We both came from a larger organisation that worked with big data systems. Thanks to our experiences, we knew we needed more control than just an ERP," Eelman says. "One example, we stored documents in project folders on a hard disk. This meant we could not manage the lifecycle and versions of documents properly. When we wanted to learn from a previously completed project, looking up the documents was very difficult and, above all, inefficient. It was also very difficult to find out the status of a found document, for example, it was not immediately clear which stage of the revision process this document was in. Was it a draft or a final contract? That required instant figuring out"

Looking up the documents was very difficult and above all inefficient

Ideally, DSE wanted version control for AutoCAD, ePlan (for electrical schematics), Word and Excel documents. This included the desire to add metadata to each document so that documents could be found quickly. The metadata would not only add the project number to documents, but also attributes such as customer name, contact information, document type, dates, revision status and so on.

Adding ERP data to Windows files thanks to database links

The solution came with the addition of M-Files document management software, which is easy to use and is a flexible database-driven platform. M-Files adds metadata to documents created with various Windows applications (Word, AutoCAD, Excel) and integrates them directly into Windows Explorer within the 'Open' and 'Save As' interface familiar to all.

"Each new entry in M-Files is associated with a project number generated by the ERP system. This link automatically ensures that new projects and contact information are placed from the ERP into the M-Files database. This happens when saving any type of document in M-Files. Employees simply select the project number from a drop down list, the rest of the descriptive values then pop up automatically from the database."

"All the documents we work with, really all of them, are now secured thanks to M-Files" says Eelman. Even incoming e-mails or hard copies from customers are digitally indexed. "When we get an invoice from a supplier, we scan it into the system. M-Files automatically adds the supplier info to it and triggers the set workflow around invoices."

Working with self-created templates

DSE even went a little further, developing templates that displayed project attributes (project number, customer name, etc.) in the page header of documents. Regardless of which in application this document was set up in. In DSE's case, this involved Word, Excel and AutoCAD.

Thanks to M-Files now finished in just half an hour

"M-Files templates save us a huge amount of time. Example, we generate a project completion file with all our latest work. For this, we had to open all documents, open all headers, change headers and save all documents separately. M-Files does this automatically. Where we used to spend half a day on it, now, thanks to M-Files, we only finish it in half an hour."

About DSE Oil and Gas

Dutch Separation Engineering Oil and Gas consists of a team of experienced and qualified engineers, handling all system integrations and associated project management, both onshore and offshore. DSE offers Power Quality core analyses for oil and gas installations worldwide thanks to the revolutionary DSE EPAQ dashboard (www.dse-epaq.com). DSE also provides oil and gas installation equipment, sales, rental and service. More information about DSE can be found at www.dseog.com.