Energy

Reinventing energy with intelligent enterprise services

August 27, 2020

In brief

The oil and gas (O&G) industry is in a state of disruption with chronic oversupply, persistently volatile prices and a looming energy transition.
Adopting intelligent enterprise services (IES) can help O&G companies generate value more quickly and achieve competitive advantage.
Accenture shares key success factors for IES and how to redefine resilience, boost competitiveness and prepare for the sustainable energy future.

A new state of play has emerged for energy companies. To succeed in this challenging, turbulent environment, companies need to be competitive, resilient and sustainable. They must make structural changes to their business. And there is no better place to start than an organization’s enterprise services.

Enterprise services—including finance, human resources, supply chain, procurement, marketing services, sales, IT and engineering—represent the backbone of the organization, upholding the enterprise as it flexes and adapts to the cyclical nature of the industry. Assuring these services are hyper-efficient, cost-effective and flexible is key to staying competitive.

Harnessing the data and insights available from these enabling functions—and acting on them—offers the organization phenomenal value and decision-making agility. Increasingly, companies are turning to reimagining the enterprise services operating model and harnessing the power of IES.

IES is an integrated, customer-centric set of services that seamlessly deliver outcomes to stakeholders across the back, middle and front office. Given the value IES offer, many energy companies are doubling down on making the most of these services. They are expanding functional scope significantly, committing to business outcomes beyond cost to serve reductions, and reimagining the services outside of process-centric models to designs focused on stakeholder need to better meet their organization’s goals.

Maximizing these elements—adopting IES—can enable energy companies to be more flexible, agile and responsive, generate value more quickly and achieve competitive advantage. Companies employing IES are seeing huge benefits, such as hundreds of millions in cost savings, productivity improvements, increased customer engagement and higher brand value.

Intelligent enterprise services help secure and protect energy companies through lower margins, higher returns and more effective ways of working.

Moving to action

IES adopts a human-centered point of view—as opposed to a process-oriented position. Organizations can enhance the value of their business services in the eyes of customers, employees and business partners, transforming performance from good to great and creating a powerful engine for top-line growth and workforce engagement.

Moving from a mindset of cost efficiency to a culture focused on value, experience and growth, the modus operandi for the team providing operational support must also change to accommodate agile methodologies, iterative approaches and new reporting metrics that focus on quality of experience.

What does IES look like in action?

Intelligent enterprises converge process, technology, data and analytics to change the way work is done and use freed capacity to generate business insights and outcomes. They integrate diverse data, combine human + machine talent and orchestrate work to build resiliency, competitiveness and strong outcomes across business functions.

Transitioning to adopting intelligent enterprise services is no easy undertaking. It requires vision, alignment among the C-suite, flexibility and commitment to doing things differently, adopting new approaches with a new set of assets. The journey to IES comprises four phases, each underpinned by a set of technologies to drive efficiency and insights, advancing at each stage of the journey and accelerating business outcomes (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Journey to intelligent enterprise services

The journey to IES comprises four phases, each underpinned by a set of technologies to drive efficiency and insights, advancing at each stage of the journey and accelerating business outcomes.

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There are five major requirements for oil and gas companies to succeed in their transformation journey to IES.

Figure 2 – Key success factors for IES

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No time to wait

Amid the industry’s current state of disruption and the critical energy transition looming ahead, O&G companies need to redefine resilience, boost competitiveness and prepare for the sustainable energy future. IES is a critical enabler of each of these imperatives—and, by extension, the industry’s reinvention.

Companies seeking to take the IES journey should ask:

What are our key strategic objectives?
What is our current IES maturity level?
What does our current operating services model look like?

How do companies begin the IES journey?

1. Develop an innovation engine

Leapfrog the existing captive enterprise center to deliver outcomes. Work with an ecosystem partner to provide process optimization and automation services and data and insights services.