Accelerating Digital Business Transformation in Financial Services
Market Changes Have Accelerated the Case for Transformation
Opportunity Created by Complexity and Volatility
Global energy markets are becoming increasingly complex and are experiencing unprecedented levels of volatility. Energy supply is constrained due to years of underinvestment, and its growth is being challenged by the financial impacts of the energy transition and rising inflation. Additionally, geopolitical unrest in Europe has exacerbated supply chain disruptions and reinforced the demand shift that began during the pandemic.
However, with complexity and volatility comes a unique opportunity to create exponential value by ensuring your organization has the systems and processes in place to respond with agility.
Adapting to the Evolving and Interconnected Commodity Market Landscape
The rapid evolution and increasingly interconnected nature of global energy markets has accelerated the case for transformation. To thrive during the energy transition, Supply and Trading organizations must adapt quickly and develop new capabilities and digital pipelines to capture opportunities across geographies and asset types.
Evolution of the Commodity Market Landscape
- Upstream: Rigs, Wells, Oil, Gas & Condensate
- Midstream: Oil, Natural Gas, Processing Plant, Crude Storage
- Downstream: Refineries, Diesel, Plastic
- End Customer: Industrial, Commercial
- Biofuel, RNG, Agro, Minerals, LNG, Power Generation, Hydrogen Manufacturing, Batteries, CCS & CO2, Solar, Alternative Fuels, Ammonia, Hydrogen Fuel, Credits, Wind, Steel, EV, Green Transportation, Cement, Agro, Credits
Addressing aging systems, manual business processes, and the proliferation of data silos across Supply, Trading, and Risk to increase agility and harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) is a critical step in capturing value during the Energy Transition.
External Factors Impacting Supply & Trading
- Geopolitical unrest and the energy transition are shifting global energy market dynamics and the Energy Supply & Trading portfolio mix.
- Hydrocarbon supply growth is challenged by rising costs, longer lead times, increasing regulation, and fiscal constraints associated with rising inflation, increasing carbon taxes, and long-term reserve devaluation.
- Oil & Gas and Power & Utility markets and infrastructure are becoming increasingly interconnected, driving the need for greater transparency and risk management across commodity value chains.
- New energies and new energy markets are rapidly emerging and changing the commodity trading landscape.
- Emissions data is becoming increasingly intertwined with trading data, and carbon credit trading is becoming a core capability.
- Energy companies are increasingly committing to net-zero emissions targets, driving the need for greater transparency, auditability, and full-cycle cost analysis.
Conducting Business Across the Front, Middle, and Back Office
Managing with Legacy Infrastructure and Manual Processes
Supply and Trading organizations rely on a suite of specialized commodity/energy trading and risk management (C/ETRM) packages, shadow systems, and extensive manual processes to manage their business.
These specialized C/ETRM packages are effective for single commodity, single market operations, but they were not designed to support cross-commodity, multi-jurisdiction trading and risk analysis. Additionally, most C/ETRM systems lack integrated deal capture, contract management, scheduling, and reporting capabilities, and have limited front-office and mid-office capabilities.
Common efforts to address C/ETRM system capability gaps have resulted in complex business architectures that are inherently inflexible, inefficient, and costly to support. The prevalence of disconnected, highly customized solutions, complex system integrations, and manual data entry and reconciliation processes in these C/ETRM-centric business architectures restrict agility, hinder innovation, and increase the level of risk associated with security breaches and human error.
Internal Challenges for Supply & Trading Organizations
- Prevalence of inflexible, commodity-specific, on-premise core C/ETRM systems with overlapping functionalities causes data silos and process inconsistency.
- Data silos, limited automation, and a lack of collaboration tools restrict timely, data-driven trade and risk analysis and hinder the use of artificial intelligence to unlock next-generation business capabilities.
- 'System of record' functionality of C/ETRM systems limits the ability to support front office requirements including forecasting, pricing, and negotiations.
- Commodity-specific system nuances drive over-customization and complex, multi-system architectures which are costly to support, difficult to integrate, and result in latency issues.
- Capability gaps, limited solution options, and the slow pace of C/ETRM modernization hampers the ability to optimize, innovate and support the Energy Transition.
- Extensive manual intervention in data aggregation, analysis and reporting across the front, mid and back office increases the risk of human error and security breaches and limits the time available for higher value-add activities.
Common Supply, Trading and Risk Personas and Tools
- VCO* / Front Office:
- Supply Chain / Marketer
- Trader
- Scheduler & Operator
- Value Chain Optimizer
- Middle Office:
- Trading Operations Manager
- Market Risk Manager
- Credit Manager
- Contract Manager
- Back Office:
- Accounting Manager
- Regulatory Manager
- External Interfaces:
- Trading Exchanges
- Market Data
- eConfirm
- Carbon Credit Registries
- Reporting
- Taxes
- Shared Tools:
- C/ETRM Packages (commodity focused, region focused, business focused, hybrid)
- Master Data Management (Systems of Record)
Function-Specific Tools
- Front Office:
- Pipeline Bulletin Boards
- ISOs / GAT / Transmission
- Scheduling Tools
- Facility, Terminal & Fleet Management
- Forecasting
- Optimization
- Middle Office:
- Confirmation (eConfirm)
- Risk Consolidation / Reporting
- Credit: Dotz / Solutions
- Contract Management
- Office Systems
- Back Office:
- ERP
- Inventory Valuation
- Tax Calculation & Reporting
- Equity / Royalty Settlement
- Recalculation Reporting
- Regulatory Reporting
- Corporate Functions:
- Accounting, Legal, Governance, Sustainability, Procurement, HR, IT, and others
- Other Business Units
*Value Chain Optimization
Moving away from a C/ETRM-centric architecture and streamlining business processes across the front, mid, and back office is necessary to reduce cost, complexity, and risk and address the rapidly evolving needs of the business.
Unlocking Value Through a Connected Digital Ecosystem
A connected digital ecosystem enables Supply, Trading & Risk organizations to unlock value by breaking down data silos, automating manual processes, and enabling real-time, data-driven decision making across the value chain.
A digital ecosystem is a connected data landscape that enables organizations to:
- Gain agility to maximize value in a rapidly evolving commodity market
- Accelerate decision-making and enhance collaboration and innovation
- Automate to improve efficiency and reduce risk
- Optimize portfolios and achieve sustainability goals by enabling end-to-end visibility
Digital Ecosystem Value Drivers
- Gain agility to maximize value in a rapidly evolving commodity market
- Accelerate decision-making and enhance collaboration and innovation
- Automate to improve efficiency and reduce risk
- Optimize portfolios and achieve sustainability goals by enabling end-to-end visibility
Agility
Rapidly respond to market changes and capture new opportunities by enabling real-time, data-driven decision making and automating manual processes across the value chain.
Collaboration
Break down silos and enable seamless collaboration across front, middle, and back office functions, as well as with external partners and counterparties.
Visibility
Enable end-to-end visibility across the value chain to optimize portfolios, manage risk, and achieve sustainability goals.
Innovation
Accelerate innovation by enabling rapid experimentation, integration of new technologies, and development of new business models.
Efficiency
Automate manual processes, reduce operational risk, and improve efficiency across the organization.
Maximizing Value While Maintaining Critical Operations
Our approach to modernizing Supply and Trading builds upon existing capabilities to minimize disruption to the business while building a strong digital foundation to unlock value now and in the future. These objectives will be achieved by:
- Leveraging existing C/ETRM systems
- Embracing open, modular development
- Following foundational data integrity and security principles
- Enabling seamless business process automation to free up resources to focus on exceptions, validation, and analysis
- Integrating comprehensive artificial intelligence capabilities to accelerate data-driven decision-making and enhance trade and risk analysis
- Drastically improving the user experience to enable modern, mobile, real-time decision support and collaboration tools
- Reducing integration complexity to allow the business to unlock higher-value workflows without disrupting day-to-day business
- Enabling transformative capabilities and the creation of new revenue streams to accelerate value creation
- Delivering continuous value by employing agile methodology
Next-Generation Supply and Trading Solution Framework
Transform Your Business with a Data-Centric Digital Ecosystem
Our vision for a data-centric Supply and Trading digital ecosystem includes three core architectural components:
- Service and integration layer leveraging comprehensive AI and low-code capabilities to create next-generation business services and digital user channels.
- Unified commercial analytics platform to securely bring together data and analytics capabilities across Supply, Trading and Risk and unlock high-value, AI-enabled workflows.
- Common commercial infrastructure layer with core systems to execute and record business-critical processes across Supply, Trading and Risk.
Accelerate Value with Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Workflows
One of the most significant benefits of moving to a data-centric architecture across Supply, Trading and Risk is the ability to unlock AI and Generative AI-enabled use cases.
Imagine traders using simple queries to analyze third-party demand forecast predictions, generate simulated forecasts, and get recommendations on hedge positions and value optimization. Demand forecasting is just one of a long list of potential use cases for real-time decision support across the front, mid, and back office.
AI and Generative AI-Enabled Use Cases Across Supply, Trading and Risk
- VCO* / Front Office:
- Demand forecasting
- Market simulation
- Price forecasting
- Schedule generation
- Sentiment analysis
- Policy and regulatory impact
- Optionality and arbitrage opportunities
- Middle Office:
- Credit ratings and scoring
- DOA & credit limits assessment
- Trade reviews and comparison
- Contract review and analysis
- Contract generation
- Risk policy violations
- Bid and offers
- Automated hedging
- Back Office:
- Automated reconciliation reporting
- Invoice matching
- Multi-variable data quality checks
- Management reporting
- Financial statement generation
- Regulatory reporting
- Independent monitoring of changes in regulation
Supply, Trading & Risk AI + Generative AI-enabled Use Cases
- Corporate Generative AI-enabled Use Cases:
- Connected Workforce, i.e., Employee Chat & Help Desk
- Information Discovery, i.e., expedite analysis by querying disparate document types and sources such as contracts, financials, etc.
- Co-pilots for M365, BI, Development, etc., i.e., prompt co-pilots to create content, visualizations, apps, etc.
*Value Chain Optimization
AI-enabled business use cases will define the next generation of Supply, Trading and Risk operations. Organizations that embrace artificial intelligence will accelerate their ability to thrive during the Energy Transition by improving margins, dramatically enhancing productivity, and developing transformative capabilities and new revenue streams.
Embarking on the Transformation Journey
A critical first step in shifting from a C/ETRM-centric architecture to a data-centric digital ecosystem across Supply, Trading and Risk is to define a framework for your transformation journey—one that prioritizes business outcomes and maps to a relevant value case.
Foundational activities to consider when defining the framework to move from a C/ETRM-centric architecture to a data-centric Supply and Trading ecosystem include:
- Decoupling front, middle, and back-office systems
- Identifying and reducing/eliminating shadow systems
- Using containers to migrate from in-house storage and compute to the cloud
- Federating and contextualizing data within the cloud to enable extensive analysis
Executing these steps while identifying, automating, and eliminating low-value add tasks will reduce complexity and risk, and deliver more than enough cost savings to fund the next phase of transformation: implementing platform-level AI and Generative AI, innovation, and collaboration capabilities to unlock new business use cases such as:
- Creating dashboards with real-time insights based on streaming market and peer data and intraday visibility to key trading and risk, portfolio, and financial metrics
- Leveraging AI and Generative AI to enable trader decision support and trade recommendations
- Automating trend and trade analysis, contract reviews, and terms and conditions evaluation
- Developing a user-friendly, mobile, integrated trading view with co-pilot capabilities
- Optimizing and automating scheduling recommendations and contract generation
- Integrating open-source risk analytics
- Cross-commodity, multi-jurisdiction portfolio optimization
- End-to-end auditability and full-cycle cost analytics
- Carbon credit marketplace development and new energies trading
- Transaction management with shared ledgers
- Data, intelligence, algorithms, and application monetization
Finally, your organization can start creating incremental value for the business by developing transformative capabilities and new revenue streams. The key to success is to first unlock the value that already exists (H1), then build upon it to enable new capabilities (H2), and finally create incremental value for the business through transformative capabilities and new revenue streams (H3).
Transformation Journey Framework
The transformation journey progresses from incremental to evolutionary, and from tactical to strategic, moving from the existing business model to a digital business model. The journey is divided into three main phases:
- H1 (Experimental):
- Automate manual front/mid/back-office tasks
- Decouple primary systems and reduce shadow systems
- Migrate storage and compute to the cloud
- Federate and contextualize data in the cloud
- Real-time insights based on streaming market and peer data
- AI + Gen AI enabled trader decision support and recommendations
- H2:
- Automate trend and trade analysis, contract reviews, and T&Cs evaluation
- Automate and optimize activities such as scheduling, contract generation, and reconciliation reporting
- Real-time visibility into trading, risk, position, and P&L
- H3 (Aspirational):
- AI + Gen AI enabled forecasting, market simulation, scenario analysis, and carbon tax planning
- End-to-end auditability, full-cycle cost analytics, and carbon credit marketplace development
- New energies trading
- Mobile integrated trading view with co-pilot capabilities
- Agile proprietary algorithms and applications
- Automate transaction management with shared ledgers
Target Business Outcomes:
- Improve Efficiency and Increase Agility
- Enhance Collaboration and Drive Innovation
- Enable Advanced Trading and Risk Practices
- Gain Full Cycle Visibility including Sustainability Impacts
- Grow Revenue through New Business Models
Next Generation, Data-Centric Supply, Trading & Risk Digital Ecosystem
Business Principles:
- H1: Optimize the Core through Data and Operational Efficiency and Resiliency
- H2: Capitalize on Investments in New Technology to Secure Strategic Advantage
Prioritizing where to start and how far to take your journey should be based on your organization’s unique market position, ambitions, and transformation vision.
Enabling the Future with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft
Leading energy companies around the world are partnering with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft to drive strategic digital transformation initiatives across their business.
Examples of how Publicis Sapient and Microsoft are helping our energy clients rethink and evolve their business models to respond to the complexities and volatility of the global energy market include:
How a Top Global Oil and Gas Company Adopted Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on Azure Cloud to Reduce Their C/ETRM Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Imperative for Change:
The U.S.-based oil and gas company wanted to improve the scalability and operational efficiency of its existing C/ETRM systems and infrastructure footprint. The organization also wanted to reduce total cost of ownership and optimize hardware utilization and investment.
Transformative Solution:
Publicis Sapient implemented infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to host and manage its existing systems using Microsoft Azure Cloud, SQL Database, Table and Blob storage. This service aimed to optimize the provisioning and cost of applications and hardware, while increasing capacity, performance, and scalability.
Business Impact:
- 25% reduction in TCO with license-as-a-go service software and pay-as-you-go hardware utilization models
- 80% decrease in time to provision new hardware while optimizing capital investment with actual utilization trends
How Chevron Unlocked Business Value by Migrating Their Supply Data Platform to Azure
Imperative for Change:
Chevron manages 200+ data pipelines and ingests supply data from various internal and external sources to standardize and share it across functions responsible for managing the flow of crude oil and refined products. Chevron needed to replace their legacy on-premise supply data platform and wanted to implement a solution that would improve collaboration and decision-making, reduce upgrade and disruption costs, and give them the power to scale.
Transformative Solution:
Publicis Sapient and Chevron designed and implemented a cloud-based solution in Azure, successfully converting 200+ data integration jobs in Azure Data Factory, modeling and migrating 400 data tables, storing 450 procedures and queries, and migrating a data quality engine without disrupting the business.
Business Impact:
- 45% of queries being completed faster
- Launch of self-service business intelligence for seamless data exploration and analysis
- Minimized support and disruption costs
- Improved ability to develop, test, and deploy changes
- Improved capability to enhance and scale the platform
As noted by Troy Engstrom, Senior Manager, Digital Carbon Management at Chevron: "We can now easily deploy advanced analytics services, including AI, quickly and easily on top of our existing data assets. Integrating those on-premise would take significantly longer."
Contact Us
To learn more about how Publicis Sapient and Microsoft can help your organization accelerate digital business transformation in Energy Supply, Trading & Risk, please contact us at:
energyandcommodities@publicissapient.com
About Publicis Sapient
Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally-enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. As digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience spanning technology, data sciences, consulting and customer obsession – combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness – enables us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value.
For more information, visit https://www.publicissapient.com
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.