Oil Well Innovators Fuel Success with MRP Software

“MRPeasy has filled every void in our manufacturing and stock management processes. It’s a software perfectly adapted to the niche of small and medium manufacturers,” says Jonathan Martin, COO and President of Black Mamba Rod Lift.

Oil well innovators from Oklahoma

Black Mamba Rod Lift is an Oklahoman producer of down-hole plastic components used in oil and gas extraction. Jonathan Martin, an innovator in his field with 15 years of experience and multiple patents for the rod lift industry, oversees the company. Black Mamba Rod Lift employs 18 people and has been steadily scaling its operations since its inception in late 2019.

Black Mamba designs and manufactures crucial components in oil extraction called rod guides. These are plastic components that are added to sucker rods through an insert-based injection molding process. Sucker rods are long, below-ground steel and/or fiberglass rods used in vertical and horizontal beam-lift oil wells which transfer mechanical motion from the surface to the down-hole reciprocating pump.

The physics involved in the operation of sucker rods is far more complicated than a simple up-down operation. The rods and their stabilizers have specific strengths, stiffness, shapes, and sizes, which require engineered consideration for the complete system. Black Mamba’s rod guides employ an innovative design that stabilizes and protects the sucker rods from compression and buckling, forcing reliability in a complex mechanical system. This represents a considerable evolution in rod lift design.

Innovative processes require innovative management

Aside from a unique product, Black Mamba Rod Lift also has peculiar inventory management requirements. Namely, the company does not manufacture the sucker rods themselves, only the plastic rod guides. Since numerous well designs and different rod types are used among Black Mamba’s clientele, the company usually installs its guides only once a sales order comes in.

To shorten lead times and simplify supply chain logistics, Black Mamba has contracts with many rod manufacturers to keep rods in stock in Black Mamba’s warehouse as consignment inventory. This means that the manufacturer needs to keep track of inventory for stock it doesn’t own alongside other stock that it does, differentiating stock costs.

In essence, Black Mamba employs a hybrid workflow in which their rod guides are made to stock but installed and customized to order. The product is standard, but the per-well design is custom.

A manufacturing system was needed from day one

Having extensive experience in manufacturing, Jonathan knew that the type of operation he was setting up required a proper manufacturing and inventory management solution from the get-go. One that would integrate well with Black Mamba’s preferred accounting software, Quickbooks Online, and natively support managing their consignment suppliers. The software also needed to be scalable, as the team expected their product to potentially disrupt the market in a substantial way. An intuition that largely proved correct as three years later, Black Mamba is upsizing buildings and expanding operations on virtually all fronts.

The search for suitable software began in 2020 when Black Mamba implemented a mid-tier ERP software that initially seemed to meet all of its requirements. However, after almost two painstaking years of trying to align the system with their use case and even hiring a consultant to help with customization, it was clear that the match was not meant to be. The software had bugs, and its integration with QuickBooks was lacking in functionality.

”We were forcing ourselves to use software that does not work for us. We realized later that the burden of forcing a square peg in a round hole was bringing employee morale down. A change had to be made, one that put us on the hunt,“ Jonathan explains.

New software was brought online in a single month

Looking for alternatives to the existing software, Jonathan did extensive trials and research, ultimately landing on MRPeasy. He looked through the software’s many demo videos and realized this looked like the solution Black Mamba needed. MRPeasy seemed to tick all the boxes, had native support for Quickbooks Online, and boasted an impressive set of stock management tools. It also promised an attractive tiered pricing feature based on the number of users. After a short trial period, the team was convinced and set focus on implementing the new software as soon as possible.

Accustomed to running and managing manufacturing systems, Jonathan took it upon himself to implement the new software. MRPeasy is designed to be self-implemented, and Jonathan found bringing the new system online to be much easier than anticipated. The software’s host of online materials and an excellent support team that usually provides answers within one business day made implementation much less cumbersome than he expected.

He extensively used MRPeasy’s spreadsheet import feature, making it possible to copy over large amounts of existing manufacturing data. After about a month, Black Mamba Rod Lift had successfully transitioned its manufacturing and inventory management to the new system.

Robust stock management and rising efficiency

Black Mamba’s inventory management and manufacturing workflows have experienced positive improvements after moving to MRPeasy. Jonathan brings an example: “Previously, we’d have to do a cleanup of our inventory and assign units to new jobs, spending days on reconciliation every month. This is not necessary anymore. MRPeasy is a part of our daily workflow instead of something we’re forced to use.“

MRPeasy’s seamless Quickbooks Online integration has considerably increased the company’s accounting efficiency. The infinite linking of custom product groups and accounts from MRPeasy to Quickbooks Online has been a serious advantage over prior software implemented at Black Mamba. The management and tracking of consignment inventory—a matter that used to complicate Black Mamba’s stock management—has also been comprehensively improved with the new system. The company can now effortlessly track consignment goods alongside regular stock through the same app.

Increased visibility into part numbers and parameters (sub-sets of inventory where Black Mamba’s manufactured SKU may be associated with different rod suppliers) has also been a game-changer for the company. Black Mamba has a large number of variations for many of its parts, and MRPeasy enables tracking all of them without the need to create separate BOMs for each variation. ”The previous system didn’t support this, and we had to use ugly workarounds, such as keeping information in freeform notes,“ Jonathan adds.

Manufacturing software perfectly adapted to SMEs

A year and a half since implementation, Jonathan Martin and the Black Mamba Rod Lift team are very pleased with MRPeasy. “We have 6 people using the system as part of their unique responsibilities, and it all just comes perfectly together,” he explains.

“For many entrepreneurs, software is often an afterthought, and it really shouldn’t be. It can be the difference between constant headaches and a smooth operation,” Jonathan adds and finishes with praise: “You have a challenging task as a software provider for small manufacturers. Trying to build a solution that caters to everyone is tough because there’s just so much diversity out there. The MRPeasy team has managed to build a working system that’s easy to use while allowing us to tune it to exactly what we need. I think MRPeasy is perfectly adapted to the niche of small and medium manufacturers.”

You might also like: Radar Systems Manufacturer Hits the Mark with MRP Software