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Dynamics 365 for Energy, Oil & Gas
Dynamics 365 Field Service and Project Operations for refineries, plants and field operations: maintenance from notification to work order, turnaround scheduling at scale, permit to work inside the job, and the SAP integration underneath all of it.
Our current work is a maintenance and turnaround management programme for one of the largest refiners in the United States: the notification-to-work-order chain, functional location and equipment rules, electronic permits, shift and calendar templates for round-the-clock operations, contractor cost flowing into project pricing, and scheduling at a scale where the standard engine had to be replaced. SAP stays the system of record. The execution layer sits on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform alongside it.
Challenges of Energy, Oil & Gas Organizations
SAP PM plans it, the field cannot see it
Functional locations, equipment, notifications and orders live in SAP Plant Maintenance. Technicians and contractors work from paper, WhatsApp and a whiteboard. The gap between the two is where schedule slips and contractor hours go unchallenged.
Planning and execution drift out of sync
What is planned in the project or the maintenance schedule does not match what happened in the field today. Changes are captured late, on the wrong record, or not at all, and the plant learns about a problem a week after it happened.
Permits, safety steps and offline work
Permit to work lives in a separate system, so it gets worked around. Crews are in areas with no signal. Documentation, safety steps and sign-off have to work on a phone, offline, and sync when the technician walks back into coverage.
Found work has no fast path
Open a vessel and discover something that is not in the plan. If raising, pricing, scheduling and approving that work takes days instead of hours, the system gets abandoned in week two and replaced by a spreadsheet.
Turnarounds, capital projects and contractors on separate systems
A turnaround is planned as a project with thousands of tasks and a hard end date, but executed by internal crews and contractors as work orders. When planning, dispatch and cost approval live in different tools, progress is known at the post-mortem and contractor invoices arrive with surprises.
Solutions & Technologies for Energy, Oil & Gas
Field Service and Project Operations working as one system, with SAP kept as the system of record and the Power Platform as the execution layer alongside it.
Field Service and Project Operations, as one system
Notification to work order to completion, tied to functional location and equipment. Turnarounds planned as projects and executed as work orders, with contractor cost approved against the project before it becomes an invoice. Scheduling and dispatch a dispatcher can actually operate, and asset history on the technician’s device, offline where the plant has no signal.
SAP stays the system of record
Functional locations, equipment, maintenance plans, cost settlement and materials stay in SAP PM. Field Service takes execution, scheduling, mobile, permits and contractors, connected through Microsoft’s SAP ERP and OData connectors. Permit to work, shift templates and found-work workflows are built on the Power Platform where the standard product stops.
Digital operations for refineries and plants
One place to answer the daily questions: what did yesterday cost, are we still going to make the date, and what is happening about that leak.
SAP
Plant Maintenance stays the system of record. Field Service takes execution, scheduling, mobile and permits, connected to SAP rather than replacing it.
Refining & downstream
Notification to work order to completion, tied to functional location and equipment, with the permit attached to the job and a found-work path that takes hours rather than days.
Turnarounds at scale
Thousands of tasks with real dependencies, contractor cost approved against the project, and daily progress and cost instead of a post-mortem.
1000+
How we approach it
Written up, in detail
Three articles from the work rather than from the brochure.
SAP PM and Field Service: which system owns what
Where the line sits when your plant already runs SAP: what SAP PM keeps, what Field Service takes, how the connectors work, and the licensing and gateway limits that catch people out.
Running a refinery turnaround in Dynamics 365
Thousands of tasks, a fixed end date, mostly contractors. Where the standard scheduling engine runs out, and what external scheduling actually commits you to.
Field Service and Project Operations, natively connected
What Microsoft’s out-of-the-box integration does, why it matters for oil and gas, and how a turnaround looks when the project and the work order share one record.
Let’s map your next steps
Bring us the maintenance or turnaround problem you are working around today. We will tell you which parts are configuration, which are engineering, and roughly what each costs.
Hear directly from the companies we’ve partnered with
Organizations from diverse sectors come to us with distinct needs — and we design solutions that match their ambitions.
WBS helped us replace an outdated system with a scalable Microsoft platform. They understood our processes quickly and delivered a solution we can actually grow with.
WBS brought clarity to a complex process landscape. Strong technical expertise, clean execution, and a solution we can rely on long-term.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we hear most often from maintenance and IT leads at plants that already run SAP.
Do we have to replace SAP PM to use Dynamics 365 Field Service?
No, and you should not. SAP PM keeps the asset register, maintenance plans, cost settlement and materials. Field Service takes execution, scheduling, mobile, permits and contractors, connected through Microsoft’s SAP ERP and OData connectors. That division is how we run it today for one of the largest refiners in the United States.
Can Field Service handle permit to work?
Not out of the box, which is why it is worth building once and properly. Modelled in Dataverse as its own record, linked to the work order and the functional location, a permit carries its type, issuing authority, expiry and state, and the mobile app can refuse to proceed against an expired one.
How large a turnaround can Project Operations schedule?
Larger than the default engine is comfortable with. Project for the Web is the right answer for most projects. At turnaround volume and dependency density, Microsoft’s external scheduling mode removes its limits at the cost of owning the data model yourself. We have built a scheduling engine for exactly that case and published a three-part series on it.
Do contractors need SAP users or full Dynamics 365 seats?
Neither. Microsoft has contractor licensing for Field Service, so external crews work orders on the mobile app without a full user seat, and they never touch SAP directly. Where the field app reads or writes SAP, Microsoft’s guidance is that users need an SAP indirect-named user licence alongside Power Apps Premium. Budget for it at the start.
What does an implementation cost?
It depends on the number of sites, the processes in scope and the SAP integration depth. We price implementations as fixed-scope projects after a scoping workshop, so you get a written figure rather than an hourly estimate, plus Microsoft licences per user per month.
Ready to modernize your energy, oil and gas operations?
Let’s map where SAP stops and where the execution layer starts, for your plant.