Frontier Oil Tools

The Company: About Frontier Oil Tools

Frontier Oil Tools is an innovative oil tool manufacturing startup established in 2014 in the energy capital of the world, Houston, TX. The Frontier team offers a line of complete engineered goods, value-added engineering, semi-finished toll work, testing services, and contract machining and manufacturing.

The Situation: Centralized Data

In 2014, Frontier Oil Tools assembled one of the top completion teams in the industry and furnished a 50,000 sq ft. warehouse with the finest machinery in the world. Approaching the full-throttle launch of engineering and manufacturing services, Frontier Oil Tools knew they needed a system in place to model bills of materials, track inventories, manage job schedules, and drive accounting and financials.

“Frontier Oil Tools did not have a single operating system to monitor purchasing, sales, quality, production, and accounting until we implemented Cetec ERP two years ago. We have benefited from the centralized data management Cetec offers, and the user interface made implementation easy.” — Matt Cutbirth, Financial Controller at Frontier Oil Tools

The Solution: Cetec ERP 

As a startup company, Frontier Oil Tools had a thin remaining budget for IT and software expenses. However, as an elite team with backgrounds managing the highly custom enterprise systems at oil giants Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Baker Hughes, the standard for a robust platform geared for an engineering and manufacturing model for Metal & Tool Fabrication was firmly in place. The Frontier Oil Tools team saw a good fit in Cetec ERP for the following most critical requirements for an end-to-end solution:

• Single system, real-time integration to cost accounting, profitability analysis
• GAAP compliant financials, P&L, Balance Sheet, General Ledger, A/R, A/P, Reconciliation
• Option for rollup of financials into consolidated corporate reporting environment
• Engineering heavy requirements for multi-level BOMs (downhole tool equipment)
• Document storage for CAD and SolidWorks drawings (from product to quote to work order to shipment)
• Robust quoting and BOM estimation
• Engineering change order management, collaborative ECO and ECR tracking with integration to product management
• Part spec groups & material substitution
• Dimensional inventory control
• Discrete metal pipe length, sheet sq footage and poundage
• Inventory activity tracking of inventory dimensions from receipt through build and shipment/invoicing
• Cut sheet management and scrap reporting, accommodating actual inventory piece dimensions and measurements in stock
• Total API Spec Q1 and Q2 management
• User friendly production scheduling, capacity planning
• Material traceability and serialization
• Raw material serialization
• Finished good serialization
• Lot and heat traceability
• Store incoming certificate of conformance docs on purchase order receipt object in document management
• Barcoding and labeling
• Job routing through machine shop

“Cetec ERP has been a valuable tool as we’ve implemented our Quality Management System in an attempt to become API Q1 9^th Edition certified. The system streamlines our processes and makes information readily available.”

The Results: Cetec ERP Implementation Benefits

Cetec ERP solved the classic problem for Frontier Oil Tools and many other manufacturing startup companies have faced: an affordable system to get off the ground with, but one that can scale effectively as the operation grows.

“Using Cetec ERP, Frontier management is able to monitor production efficiency rates and utilization rates, and we can change burden rates based on real-time numbers.”

Since 2014, Frontier Oil Tools has moved to two full shifts in order to keep their machines running at maximum capacity. In 2015, they moved their shop floor from a paper-based system to fully electronic job routing, work instructions, data collection, and inspection reporting. The cloud deployment of Cetec ERP enabled a quick and inexpensive deployment of mobile hardware needed to drive a fully paperless shop floor.

Job shops and ETO manufacturers need easy-to-use shop floor software tracking tools to provide visibility and drive costing and financial reporting. Cetec ERP is the most affordable and best cloud ERP for job shops, metal fabricators, and engineering heavy operations.