PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-14 00:17:55

Reimagining Energy Supply, Trading & Risk Management for Oil & Gas

Create a data-centric digital ecosystem across Supply, Trading, and Risk to unlock value by increasing agility, streamlining business processes, and enabling next-generation decision support and portfolio optimization capabilities.

Market Changes Have Accelerated the Case for Transformation

Opportunity Created by Complexity and Volatility

Global energy markets are becoming increasingly complex and 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

External Factors Impacting Supply & Trading

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.

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

Common Supply, Trading, and Risk Personas and Tools

*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 by Creating a Connected Data Landscape

A connected data landscape is the foundation for a modern, data-centric digital ecosystem that enables agility, collaboration, and innovation across the front, middle, and back office. By breaking down data silos and automating business processes, organizations can unlock new value, reduce risk, and accelerate the energy transition.

Digital Ecosystem Value Drivers

Agility: Rapidly respond to market changes and capture new opportunities by enabling real-time access to data and insights across the value chain.

Collaboration: Break down silos and enable seamless collaboration across teams, business units, and external partners to drive better business outcomes.

Visibility: Achieve end-to-end visibility across the supply, trading, and risk value chain to optimize portfolios, manage risk, and achieve sustainability goals.

Innovation: Accelerate innovation by enabling data-driven decision-making, automating manual processes, and unlocking new business models and capabilities.

Efficiency: Automate and streamline business processes to reduce cost, complexity, and risk, and free up resources for higher value-add activities.

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:

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:

  1. Service and integration layer leveraging comprehensive AI and low-code capabilities to create next-generation business services and digital user channels.
  2. Unified commercial analytics platform to securely bring together data and analytics capabilities across Supply, Trading, and Risk and unlock high-value, AI-enabled workflows.
  3. Common commercial infrastructure layer with core systems to execute and record business-critical processes across Supply, Trading, and Risk.

Conceptual Solution Architecture

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

*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:

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:

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 is a horizontal progression from left to right, labeled from "Tactical" to "Strategic" and from "Digital Business Model" (top) to "Existing Business Model" (bottom). The journey is divided into three horizons: H1 (Experimental), H2, and H3 (Aspirational).

Key elements in the journey:

Target Business Outcomes:

  1. Improve Efficiency and Increase Agility
  2. Enhance Collaboration and Drive Innovation
  3. Enable Advanced Trading and Risk Practices
  4. Gain Full Cycle Visibility including Sustainability Impacts
  5. Grow Revenue through New Business Models

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.

Next Generation, Data-Centric Supply, Trading & Risk Digital Ecosystem

Business Principles:

Relative Impact: Low, Medium, High

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:
The solution increased capacity and on-demand scalability based on system performance, in addition to delivering the following outcomes:

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:
Migrating the data foundation to Azure has minimized support and disruption costs and improved operational capabilities resulting in:

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 you reimagine your Supply, Trading & Risk business and unlock value through a data-centric digital ecosystem.

Contact our Energy & Commodities team at:
energyandcommodities@publicissapient.com

About Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. We bring a startup mindset and agile methods to both established companies and the public sector, unlocking value in ways that delight their customers and improve their operational effectiveness. Our approach is grounded in a deep understanding of our clients’ industries and the unique challenges they face. We combine strategy, consulting, experience, and engineering to drive digital transformation and help our clients thrive in the digital age.

For more information, visit https://www.publicissapient.com