How a 3,500-Person Industrial Services Carve-Out Got Off Oracle and Onto NetSuite in Under Nine Months

PSC was becoming its own company again.

For fifteen years, Petroleum Service Corporation had operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of SGS, the Swiss inspection and testing giant. In July 2019, a private equity sponsor took PSC private. With that came independence, and with independence came a deadline. The new PSC had to come off the parent’s IT environment, including Oracle Financials and Project Accounting, on a defined timeline.

Roughly 3,500 employees. More than 100 sites, concentrated on the Gulf Coast. Plant and terminal operations for chemicals, refining, midstream, and marine transportation customers, plus a marine division running on a legacy AS/400.

The RFP went out in September 2019. Target go-live was the spring of 2020.

Inscio came in at the front of that process. We helped PSC evaluate the platform options, scoped the work against the carve-out clock, licensed NetSuite, and led the implementation. From go-live forward, we stayed on as the partner for optimization, custom development, and ongoing support through the lines of business that came after.

A new platform built around how PSC actually operates.

PSC’s plant and terminal business is contract-driven. Customer master contracts govern how time is captured, priced, and billed, by site, by customer, by line. That function had been running inside Oracle Project Accounting, fed by spreadsheets. The new platform had to support it natively from day one.

The old environment also ran on a 12-segment general ledger inherited from a much larger parent. PSC wanted a chart of accounts that fit its own business, not SGS’s.

And the marine division ran on a separate AS/400 with its own operational logic that the marine teams depended on. We kept it where it was and built clean integrations into NetSuite, so the new platform had the data without disrupting the people doing the work.

Adopt the client’s language and the client’s process.

PSC came out of a large-company environment with mature documentation and project management habits. They wanted those habits carried forward into the new world.

We adopted their terminology. We adopted their documentation standards. We ran a full gap analysis against stock NetSuite and surfaced more than 400 items: reports, interfaces, conversions, enhancements, forms, and workflows. Every one had an owner, a design, a build, and a test plan.

Each item was tracked, built, tested, and signed off the same way. That discipline is what got 400-plus gaps closed inside a fixed window, on a project that began just as the pandemic was clamping down on travel and in-person work.

Project to Cash for a contract-driven services business.

The hardest part of the engagement was building a project, time, and billing model that matched how PSC actually made money.

PSC’s revenue is tied to customer master contracts with very specific pricing structures and very detailed labor tracking. Different rate schedules. Different escalations. Different rules for what time was billable, how, and against which project line. By site. By customer. By contract.

The standard NetSuite Project model is a strong starting point. It was not, by itself, a finished answer for this business.

We extended it.

We built pricing structures inside NetSuite Project that mirrored the master contract terms PSC was actually operating under. We built labor tracking that tied weekly time entries back to the contract line that governed how that time was priced, accrued, and billed.

Then we built the integration layer to feed it. More than 100 weekly time integrations from the operating systems in the field, covering 3,500 employees across more than 100 sites. Time came in weekly. It was matched against the customer contract. Where billable work had been performed but not yet invoiced, the system calculated month-end accruals automatically.

On top of that, we built revenue and expense allocations. Large pools of revenue and cost that needed to be split across projects on defined formulas. PSC did not want a finance team manually unwinding allocations every month. They wanted the system to do it. We made the system do it.

Procure to Pay, including the field.

Procurement was the second large workstream.

We built accounts payable automation, including the data feeds and integrations needed to bring AP volume into NetSuite without manual re-keying. We layered in custom workflows for acquisitions of assets and services, with the specific approval paths PSC required for capital purchases versus operating purchases.

Then we pushed it down to the employees. The NetSuite Employee Center became a requisition portal. Field employees and managers could submit, route, and approve requests through the same platform that finance was using to close the books. Approvals happened where the work was happening, not in a separate tool.

That is what brought the platform from a finance ERP to an operating system the business actually used every day.

Go-live during a pandemic.

The project began as COVID was shutting down travel and in-person work. Roughly 95% of the engagement was delivered remotely, before that was the default for ERP work. Requirements gathering, design sessions, build, testing, user training, and cutover all ran through a remote model that Inscio and PSC built together.

Less than nine months after the carve-out plan was signed, PSC was off Oracle and live on NetSuite. The 12-segment GL was rebuilt as something the new PSC could actually use. The marine AS/400 fed the new platform cleanly without anyone in the field having to change how they worked.

One foundation, more than one business.

The initial implementation was scoped around PSC’s plant and terminal operations. That was the largest piece of the company and the part that had to land first.

It was not the last piece.

In subsequent phases, Inscio extended the same NetSuite foundation into Railcar Repair, with its own service workflows, billing patterns, and field integrations. Then into Sustainability Operations, where PSC was building a real recycling business: collecting post-industrial and post-consumer plastic resin, grading it, processing it, and manufacturing new product from it.

That phase moved the platform into complex manufacturing, and the standard NetSuite model needed real extension to fit it. We built customizations around how material was taken in, inspected, and graded at receipt. We built unit of measure conversions so material moving from inbound scrap through processing and into finished product was tracked consistently, even when the units changed at each stage. And we built costing logic that worked for a recycled-content product line, where the cost of the input material is itself a function of how it was sourced and processed.

All of it ran on the same NetSuite instance that closed the books for the rest of the company.

Three different operating models on one platform. Built in sequence, on top of a foundation that was designed at the start to be extended.

A foundation that held.

The carve-out hit its date. A 3,500-person industrial services company stood up its own ERP, on its own platform, with its own controls, on a fixed clock, during a pandemic.

The 400-plus gap items closed. The contract-tied project, labor, and revenue model worked. The 100-plus weekly time integrations ran. The accruals calculated. The allocations posted. The employee requisition portal was live. The marine AS/400 fed the new platform without disruption. The line of business systems in the field kept running.

And the foundation that was designed for plant and terminal operations was strong enough to carry Railcar Repair and a recycling manufacturing line later, without being torn down and rebuilt.

That is what a well-scoped carve-out implementation looks like.