When Matt Sicinski, SVP and Chief Accounting Officer at Summit Midstream, walked into his company’s ERP evaluation, the assumption was Dynamics 365. It was the easy button, the choice everyone expected. Then Matt ran the fit-gap analysis, and the facts pointed somewhere else entirely: Oracle Fusion.
This episode is a follow-on to a recent STARS panel on ERP and tech stack decisions, where Matt joined two other finance and technology leaders in Houston. Two stories from his career deserved more room than a panel format allows, and this conversation gives them that room.
The first goes back to Southwestern Energy during the shale revolution, where Matt’s team was pouring roughly $2 billion a year into CapEx, drilling wells at close to $3 million apiece, moving from the Fayetteville Shale up into the Marcellus. The accounting systems in place simply couldn’t keep pace with the volume. Picture a gerbil on a wheel that can’t spin fast enough. Separate systems ran the AFE process, the revenue side, the sand company, the drilling rig operations, the rental equipment, the midstream business, a vertically integrated operation held together by disconnected pieces. That mismatch between growth and infrastructure is what pushed leadership to pursue something enterprise-wide.
The second story is current: Summit Midstream, where Matt has been CAO since 2020, and where the same category of decision, choosing a system to run the business on, played out under very different circumstances and led to a very different answer than the one everyone assumed going in.
What connects both chapters isn’t the technology stack. It’s a principle Matt keeps coming back to: don’t walk in with a conclusion already decided. Answer the actual question in front of you, not just the mail that’s easiest to answer. Let the facts guide the decision, even when they lead somewhere you didn’t expect.
Tune in for how a rigorous fit-gap process took Matt from an assumed Dynamics 365 pick to Oracle Fusion instead.
