Business Process Streamlining – A Large Oil & Gas Company
The Client is one of the largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the world, with more than 2.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BBOE) of proved reserves. The client wanted an integrated approach embracing processes, people and technology to achieve operational excellence and improving overall performance. As a part of this approach, one important task was to improve operational efficiency by integrating various business workflows such as upstream and downstream project systems and SAP to reduce manual processes. The client also needed automation across business processes in order to minimize the need to reconcile across multiple systems. Expedien assisted the client in standardizing the business rules, automating and integrating various workflows across the organization, and hence minimizing manual intervention.
Key Challenges
- Manual integration between upstream and downstream project systems and SAP, main ERP system used by the client globally
- Extensive manual intervention on both initial data entry and management of integration points
- Data inaccuracy and lack of ability to audit data because of manual intervention in integration touch points
- Very less or no automation across business processes, hence a long and inefficient exercise to reconcile across multiple systems
Benefits
- Projects Control Systems Integration – The process is Audit certified and FASBI guidelines compliant.End-users never log on to SAP.
- Reduced the month-end close process by two days
- Projects Approval Automation – The process is end-user driven. Almost a thousand users use the U/I to create, cancel and edit project requests. This has resulted in increased use and timely collection of project data leading to more accurate reporting and project forecasting
- The application and the process manage almost 25000 Projects and 245000 WBS elements in addition to a capital budget of $ 5.6 Billion worth of Asset Investments every year
- The process supports complete project lifecycle (Original, Revisions and Supplement and Close)
- End users track, monitor and report out of the application, only the centralized AFE group has access to update/maintain Projects and hence increased the effectiveness of project controls minimizes administrative project change orders and increases the accuracy of project health reporting
- Composite project reporting via a Business Analytics based Project dashboard tool. Unified project reporting across the enterprise and hence easier to track common metrics across projects for a clearer understanding of project health and increased risk awareness leading to more efficient use of management resources focused on the most critical red-hot issues
Implementation Highlights
- Projects Control Systems Integration using Web Dynpro based U/I to start and complete the process
- The whole process is guided by an SAP Workflow engine including the approvals and hence built on standard, approved technology, leveraging the customer’s IT investment and promoting standardization
- An interactive UI guiding the end user step by step through requests and establishment of approval based on a hierarchical approval process with SAP based monetary approval levels
- Integration with email and blackberry for mobile Approvals and workflow processing
- Integration with Documentum as a project deliverable repository