PUBLISHED DATE: 2026-09-10 04:03:30

Reimagining Energy Supply, Trading and Risk Management for Oil and 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

Upstream

Midstream

Downstream

End Customer

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

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.

COMMON SUPPLY, TRADING AND RISK PERSONAS AND TOOLS

VCO / Front Office

Personas:

Middle Office

Personas:

Back Office

Personas:

External Interfaces:

Shared Tools:

Function-Specific Tools:

VCO / Front Office

Middle Office

Back Office

Corporate Functions

Other Business Units

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.

INTERNAL CHALLENGES FOR SUPPLY & TRADING ORGANIZATIONS

Transform your Supply and Trading landscape to realize your business potential

UNLOCKING VALUE WITH A DATA-CENTRIC DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

Agility is crucial for businesses facing increasing geopolitical, regulatory, and financial market complexity, and an accelerating energy transition. Harnessing the power of data is imperative for organizations to gain and maintain competitive advantages as the world enters a new era defined by artificial intelligence.

To increase business agility and unlock value through AI-enabled next-generation capabilities, Supply and Trading organizations should recenter their systems and business operations around a connected data landscape.

Publicis Sapient and Microsoft envision that landscape as a data-centric Supply and Trading digital ecosystem that leverages an end-to-end, unified analytics platform and low code innovation tools to increase agility, streamline business processes, and enable next-generation decision support and portfolio optimization capabilities.

DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM VALUE DRIVERS

VALUE DRIVERS FOR SUPPLY AND TRADING MODERNIZATION

Creating a data-centric digital ecosystem across Supply, Trading and Risk that can adapt and scale with the energy industry unlocks value across five axes of digital transformation:

Agility

Decouple systems, federate data, and create a data-centric ecosystem in the cloud to reduce complexity, enhance security, increase transparency, and promote scalability, adaptability, and accessibility.

Collaboration

Create mobile user interfaces and executive dashboards with embedded workflow collaboration tools to improve accessibility, expedite information sharing, and enable rapid decision-making across the business.

Visibility

Centralize data and apply data modeling, integration, and artificial intelligence to enable end-to-end auditability, full-cycle cost analytics, and portfolio-level value chain optimization.

Innovation

Use low-code and no-code development tools, agile development principles, and a data-rich ecosystem to crowd-source business ideas and codify knowledge within modular applications.

Efficiency

Automate back-office processes for deal capture, contract management, scheduling, and reporting to reduce cycle time, mitigate risks and refocus resources on value creation. Leverage platform-enabled artificial intelligence to evolve trading algorithms and generate actionable insights in near real-time.

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

1. Service & Integration Layer

Digital User Channels:
Business Services:
Foundation & Utility Services:

2. Data & Analytics

3. Common Commercial Infrastructure Layer

External Integration:
Supply:
C/ETRM Services:
Other Core Systems:
ERP:
Infrastructure & Enablers:

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

Middle Office

Back Office

Corporate Generative AI-enabled Use Cases

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) and then to build upon it to enable new capabilities (H2), and finally to create incremental value for the business through transformative capabilities and new revenue streams (H3).

TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY FRAMEWORK

Digital Business Model
Business principles:
Relative Impact:
Target Business Outcomes:
Illustrative journey items shown in the framework:
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

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, modelling 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.”

Create your digital future

To win in a world of accelerating change, Energy companies must invest in digital capabilities that reduce complexity, increase scalability, and enable rapid adaptation.

Partner with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft to define those capabilities and develop a secure, scalable, data-centric digital ecosystem across Supply, Trading and Risk that drives a virtuous cycle of efficiency gains and transformational value creation.

Let’s create the future of Energy Supply, Trading and Risk Management together.

For more information, please contact energyandcommodities@publicissapient.com.

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 operate through our expert SPEED capabilities: Strategy and Consulting, Product, Experience, Engineering and Data, which combined with our culture of curiosity and deep industry knowledge, enables us to deliver meaningful impact to our clients’ businesses through reimagining the products and experiences their customers truly value. Our agile, data-driven approach equips our clients’ businesses for change, making digital the core of how they think and what they do. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe with 20,000 people and over 50 offices worldwide. For more information, visit https://www.publicissapient.com.

Microsoft for Energy & Resources

Transform the energy and resources industry and achieve net zero with technology innovation to deliver safe, reliable, clean energy for a sustainable future. Microsoft enables companies to drive digital transformation, decarbonize, and achieve growth. With Microsoft, energy operators and providers have access to a global partner ecosystem and modern productivity platform at the scalability and reach they need with the security to protect their IP assets, operations, and data. By uniting productivity, intelligent cloud, intelligent edge, AI, and big data platforms, Microsoft helps companies solve their most complex challenges, accelerate the energy transition, and deliver better outcomes.