Ensco’s single instance of PeopleSoft went live in the first quarter of 2003 for all its offices and rigs, and now all its inventory information is in one place. If a rig off of Venezuela needs a particular piece of equipment, instead of buying it from a supplier, Ensco can check to see if another rig has it sitting in inventory. The single instance allows Ensco to visualize its purchasing habits and hence maximize its purchasing power. In fact, the company can now run reports on anything it likes.

One area that is particularly useful, says Chapman, is analyzing maintenance trends. Each rig is essentially just millions of pieces of equipment thrown together. "The amount our customers pay us on a daily basis doesn’t allow for too many failures," says Chapman. By doing a detailed analysis of all of its equipment, Ensco can figure out the optimal time for preventative maintenance, reducing both downtime and equipment failures. Chapman believes that this translates into a competitive advantage.

Why They’re Waiting for Web Services

Proponents of the single-instance approach, everyone from CIOs to vendors, recognize that what they’re gaining in integration they are sacrificing in functionality. An inventory module from an ERP vendor simply won’t have all the features that one from a vendor of inventory software will. For Chapman, it was an easy sacrifice to make; he says that Ensco’s point applications weren’t that good to begin with. But for other CIOs, that may not be the case. For them, cost, functionality and the ability to collaborate with partners dictate that either they integrate their existing systems using today’s XML-based integration tools or they wait until Web services matures.

Costs. Many companies have made substantial investments in best-of-breed software that they don’t want to write off. When, for example, big oil companies were first moving to ERP packages in the late ’80s, Holly, a $1 billion oil refiner, looked at the big vendors before deciding to build its own ERP-like system for financials, called Trafx. Over the years, Trafx grew to include crude-oil purchasing, joint-interest and product billing, and project accounting, evolving to the point where it had one data store. But Trafx doesn’t do everything the company needs?for example, asset management and enterprise reporting. "We looked at several ERP solutions, and they could perform all of the new functions we needed," says Holly CIO and Vice President of IT Tommy Guercio. "But the problem was that if we wanted the full benefit, we would have had to buy their financials, purchasing and billing as well. We couldn’t have gone in and just done the areas that we needed."