Additionally, the company is evaluating a rollout of the invoicing solution to its operations in Australia, Trinidad, and the UK.

Using the solution, suppliers receive orders for services from BHP Billiton Petroleum's SAP system and send invoices through the Quadrem platform, leveraging a central catalogue of approved service items. The invoice is stored in the platform and a "proforma invoice" is sent to BHP Billiton Petroleum.

Once the proforma invoice is approved, the platform releases the invoice, which is automatically loaded into BHP Billiton Petroleum's SAP system for final payment. According to Quadrem, payment approval cycles are traditionally inefficient for oil and gas companies, because upstream services involve so many variables. Other functionality includes attachments and discrepancy reporting for both planned and unplanned items, and an audit trail for all changes, approvals and discrepancies.

Quadrem CEO Charles Jackson said BHP Billiton has been an important customer "for years, on the mining side", and has experience with its ability to deploy effective supply chain solutions globally.

"As we've expanded our offering to the oil and gas industry, they and their suppliers have been instrumental in helping us resolve the challenges of complex services procurement that are common in oil and gas," Jackson said. "We've developed a solution that works with and builds upon BHP Billiton's SAP infrastructure."