PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-14 00:48:22

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. The 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, Power & Utilities organizations must adapt quickly and develop new capabilities and digital pipelines to capture opportunities across geographies and asset types.

External Factors Impacting Organizations

Evolution of the Commodity Market Landscape

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

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

Common Supply, Trading, and Risk Personas and Tools

Personas:

Shared Tools:

Function-Specific 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 Across Supply, Trading, and Risk

Digital Ecosystem Value Drivers

A connected data landscape enables organizations to unlock value by increasing agility, streamlining business processes, and enabling next-generation decision support and portfolio optimization capabilities.

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 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, middle, 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 who 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:

Supply, Trading & Risk AI + Generative AI-enabled Use Cases

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

The transformation journey is a progression from tactical, digital business model improvements to strategic, aspirational outcomes. The journey is mapped in three main phases:

Target business outcomes progress from improving efficiency and increasing agility, to enhancing collaboration and driving innovation, enabling advanced trading and risk practices, gaining full-cycle visibility including sustainability impacts, and growing 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.

Enabling the Future with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft

Leading Power & Utilities companies around the world are partnering with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft to drive strategic digital transformation initiatives across their business.

Case Study: How a Top Power & Utilities Company Implemented Physical and Financial Trading and Risk Management Capabilities for Renewable Assets of North American Operations

Imperative for Change

The organization is a global multinational energy company that generates and trades electricity within North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. It is one of the world’s largest offshore wind power generation companies and aims to be climate-neutral by 2040, supported by a €55 billion investment into renewables and creating more than 60 gigawatts (GW) of green capacity over the same period of time.

The organization’s Supply & Trading business unit was tasked with maximizing wholesale margins while effectively managing exposure in increasingly volatile energy markets. It saw asset optimization as key to driving value. The organization embarked on a journey to establish a common platform for its global Supply & Trading group so that it could:

Transformative Solution

Publicis Sapient and Microsoft’s objective was to standardize the company’s operating model and leverage synergies across the portfolio for commercial optimization as much as possible. We aimed to:

We worked closely with the business to deepen capabilities to inform the target state architecture design on the ETRM platform. We also developed a phased integration roadmap—comprised of eight separate releases—which prioritized long-term trading and quickly enabling critical risk management activities and controls.

Business Impact

Case Study: How a Power & Gas Company Implemented a Wholesale and Retail ETRM Platform

Imperative for Change

A fully integrated North American Power & Gas business, the organization is active in both trading and marketing to retail and commercial/industrial customers. It provides a mix of power from wind- and gas-generation fleets and upstream gas production. Regulated in the United States and Canada, the business spans five geographies and two currencies.

The organization was undergoing a period of growth supported by a number of acquisitions. As a result, it needed to:

Transformative Solution

Publicis Sapient designed and implemented the ETRM platform to support the integrated wholesale/retail power and gas business. This design helped:

Since the initial go-live date, we have continued to support the organization on an ongoing basis by providing upgrades and end-of-day services.

Business Impact

Contact Us

To learn more about how Publicis Sapient and Microsoft can help your organization modernize Supply, Trading, and 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

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