Streamlining Oil and Gas Business Operations with an End-to-End Digital Approach

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SAP is helping a variety of companies transform into intelligent enterprises by utilizing an end-to-end digital approach, and some of our biggest success stories have come from the Oil and Gas industry. In fact, one of our most prominent customers has gone through a complete digital transformation by integrating a host of SAP powered digital technologies across its entire global exploration & production (E&P) business, including upstream operations, production, procurement, maintenance, finance, revenue, HR, and more.

Earlier the company was dependent on multiple systems, standards, technologies and processes across operating locations, a process that was burdened with several inefficiencies. However, after turning to SAP solutions, it’s now running the entire business with a simpler, data-intelligent ERP platform built on industry-specific templates. This has resulted in decreased asset downtime and operating costs and a consistent stream of strategically valuable insights from various data sources. They have a real-time view into operations, enabling them to streamline departments and more efficiently deploy personnel. On the heels of its end-to-end digital transformation, this oil and gas company reported its highest net income in four years in 2018, with a registered annualized EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) to average capital employed of 21%.

These bottom-line figures are a good indication of what end-to-end data intelligence can do for an oil and gas enterprise, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few examples of how digital tools and approaches can transform an E&P operation:

• With a sensor-equipped, Internet of Things-connected equipment and predictive analytics tools, an E&P company can use advanced detection and diagnosis to avoid costly failures at a well site, gathering operation, pipeline, refinery, etc.

• With an end-to-end digital platform in place, a company can shed the often complex, siloed and expensive hardware-driven IT solutions and processes on which it has long relied, replacing them with a simplified cloud-based framework where business processes and ecosystems are integrated and connected, and where data, learning and best business practices flow freely and securely across the enterprise.

• A digital platform with machine learning and AI can serve as the brain of a production operation, drawing from deep learning algorithms to analyze real-time data, identify patterns and anomalies in the data, then make decisions to optimize asset efficiency. For example, by creating a virtual representation or model of a production operation — what’s known as a digital twin — a company can run data through the twin to optimize production systems quickly to unlock new production.

The digital twin essentially is a machine learning-powered analytics platform for modelling existing physical systems in the digital realm, so a company can run different scenarios to determine likely outcomes, then make strategic decisions accordingly. Used in tandem with predictive tools, a digital twin not only can help maximize production, but it also can foresee maintenance issues, equipment failures and the like, heading off potential disruptions.

Incture is the implementation and innovation partner, who is making the most of the cutting-edge technology developed by SAP, with deep expertise in setting up an end-to-end digital platform for oil and gas enterprises. Few of the benefits oil and gas customers gained out of partnering with Incture are:

• 60% reduction in process cycle time
• Digital oil-field solution roll-out in 10 weeks
• ROI realization in less than 1 year.

To know more about Incture solutions for Oil and Gas, request for a demo at http://incture.com/request-a-demo/

Brent Potts

About the Author:
The Senior Director of Industry Marketing—Oil and Gas at SAP, Brent is a global marketing/sales, business development, and business management leader in the industrial business sector. He has diverse technical, marketing/sales and business management background with extensive new business development experience on a wide variety of business models, including government and commercial. Brent has demonstratable experience in guiding personnel in technical and business applications and directing their efforts in a team approach to meet objectives.