Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) is a roughly $25 billion oil, gas, and chemicals company with operations concentrated in the Permian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, the Middle East, and through its OxyChem subsidiary. That spread matters for suppliers, because Oxy does not buy as one monolith. Upstream drilling operations, midstream infrastructure, the OxyChem plants, and the corporate side all source differently, and the registration system reflects that. If you want to sell to Oxy, the first thing to understand is that registering is the easy part, and registering is not the same as getting work.
What Oxy actually buysOxy's spend skews heavily toward the operational categories you would expect from a large upstream and chemicals operator: drilling and completion services, oilfield equipment and tubulars, chemicals and proppants, construction and fabrication, environmental and remediation services, logistics and trucking, facilities maintenance, and the long tail of indirect categories every large company needs (IT, MRO supplies, professional services, staffing, safety gear).
The practical takeaway: Oxy buys at scale and inside specific operating regions. A welding shop near Midland, a chemical packaging firm near a Gulf Coast plant, or a software vendor with energy-sector references all map to a real buyer. A generic "we do consulting" pitch does not. Know which business unit and which geography your offering serves before you register.
How registration actually worksOxy runs a two-stage system, and confusing the two is the most common mistake.
Stage one is prospective supplier registration. Oxy maintains an Oracle iSupplier environment, and the front door is a Prospective Supplier Registration Form on oxy.com. A few mechanics that trip people up:
- You select the appropriate Occidental subsidiary and country first, because the form routes differently by entity.
- You submit one form per legal entity. If your company has multiple legal entities that want to do business with Oxy, each registers separately.
- The form includes a mandatory survey. Oxy's own guidance states that submissions without a completed survey are automatically rejected. Do not skip it, and do not rush it. The survey is where you describe capabilities, certifications, and qualifications, and it is what a category manager reads when deciding whether to look at you.
After you submit, you wait. If there is buyer interest, you receive an automated notification that your company has been registered and granted access to the iSupplier Portal, where you provide deeper qualification information. This is invitation-gated. Submitting the form does not guarantee a portal invite, and it does not create a contract.
Stage two is transacting. Once you are actually doing business with Oxy, purchase orders and invoicing run through the SAP Ariba Network. Oxy sends a Trading Relationship Request (TRR) through Ariba; you accept it, and from there you can submit electronic invoices against POs. Ariba is a transaction rail, not a sales channel. You do not "apply" through Ariba to become a supplier, and chasing the Ariba side before you have a buyer relationship is wasted effort.
So the honest sequence is: registration form (with survey) -> possible iSupplier invitation -> qualification -> awarded work -> Ariba onboarding.
How to get noticed instead of buriedLarge energy procurement systems take in far more registrations than any category manager will ever read cold. Getting an invite usually comes from one of three places, and the registration form is rarely the first.
Be specific and operational in the survey. Name the NAICS-relevant categories, the regions you can actually serve, your safety record (in oilfield and chemical work, EHS performance and incident rates are a gate, not a nicety), and any prequalification you already hold with platforms like ISNetworld or Avetta. Energy buyers screen hard on safety and insurance before capability.
Get in front of the operating units. Permian and Gulf Coast operations have local procurement and supply-chain contacts, and a real referral from an operations engineer or a category lead beats a cold form every time. Industry events, regional energy supplier expos, and existing prime contractors are where those relationships start.
Subcontract to a prime first. This is the most reliable on-ramp and it deserves its own section below.
The diverse-business angleOxy has a stated Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB) commitment and has staffed a Group Head of Diverse Business Inclusion, which signals that diverse spend is tracked at a senior level rather than left to chance. What Oxy does not publish, as of this writing, is a detailed public-facing supplier diversity portal with a named program, certification list, and Tier-2 reporting requirements the way some Fortune 500 buyers do. Treat that as a gap to confirm directly, not as evidence the company ignores diverse suppliers.
What you can do regardless: hold a recognized third-party certification so that when Oxy's diverse-spend tracking runs, your firm is classifiable. The certifications that corporate buyers in this sector typically recognize are NMSDC for minority-owned firms (MBE), WBENC for women-owned (WBE), and NaVOBA / SDVOSB documentation for veteran-owned firms. If you are minority-owned and have not certified yet, our NMSDC certification guide walks through eligibility and the application. The certification is not a magic key into Oxy, but it makes you findable to the people whose job is to find diverse suppliers, and it strengthens the survey you submit.
If you want help getting certified once and being recognized across multiple corporate and government programs, that is what CertifyAll is built for.
The Tier-2 side doorThis is the move most diverse suppliers underuse. Oxy does enormous volumes of work through prime contractors: the drilling companies, the EPC and fabrication firms, the chemical logistics providers. Those primes carry their own supplier-diversity expectations, and many large energy and industrial primes report Tier-2 diverse spend back to their customers. Becoming a qualified subcontractor to one of Oxy's existing primes can put you on an active project faster than waiting for a direct iSupplier invitation, and it builds the past-performance record that makes a direct Oxy relationship credible later.
Two practical steps: identify who already holds the Oxy contracts in your category and region, and approach them as a certified subcontractor with a tight capability statement. A clean profile in our supplier directory makes that introduction easier, because primes and corporate buyers both search there for diverse firms in specific NAICS codes and regions.
Before you hit submitRegister on the right entity. Complete the survey as if a category manager is reading it, because one is. Lead with safety, insurance, and the specific region you serve. Hold a current certification so the diverse-spend systems can see you. And do not treat the form as the finish line, because the work comes from relationships the form can only start.
Oxy is one of dozens of large corporate buyers running this same iSupplier-plus-Ariba pattern with slightly different rules. If you are mapping where your certification and capabilities actually have a buyer, the corporate program directory is a good place to see which programs publish open registration and what each one screens for.
