In partnership, Publicis Sapient and Microsoft help organizations become digitally enabled, transforming the way they work and better serving their end customers. Our global strategic alliance brings together leading-edge cloud technologies with specialist digital-first consulting services to help you thrive amid fast-changing market conditions.
In this executive briefing, we explore the importance of a modern, responsive value chain in the Oil & Gas sector—and specifically how a unified approach to data can lead to smarter operational decisions.
The energy market is more volatile than ever. Supply and demand are in flux. Pricing is unpredictable. Expectations are evolving. It’s a changing landscape.
The outbreak of Covid-19 caused a dramatic drop in demand for oil products in 2020, which continues to affect the entire sector. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global energy demand has dropped by 5%—and that it will not fully recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2023 at the earliest. Adding further volatility is the issue of oversupply, exacerbated by ongoing production fluctuations between members of OPEC. Analysts predict that global stockpiles of crude and refined products will still not be cleared by the end of 2021.
See how Publicis Sapient has created a tool for energy providers to balance supply and demand, informed by real-time market data.
There’s the further challenge of transitioning to renewable technologies, alternative energy sources, and a more diverse product portfolio—while also maintaining investor confidence.
See how Publicis Sapient is helping:
Decarbonization is driving regulatory changes and new consumer preferences, which organizations need to respond to—quickly and responsibly. This requires transparency on how decisions are made in order to satisfy investors, customers, and regulatory bodies.
Broader environmental, social, and governance (ESG) pressures are also being felt throughout the oil and gas value chain, with upstream facing the most scrutiny for its effect on the environment and midstream (i.e., pipelines, storage, processing units) for its social impact and governance structure.
Oil and gas companies must also address the challenge of customer satisfaction. Digital services, mobile apps, and personalized offers are now fundamental to securing consumer loyalty. Business customers want the ability to compare fuel open rack prices and purchasing terms against futures prices and OPIS indices.
Suppliers and retailers are therefore innovating to offer more convenient services, such as:
See how Publicis Sapient has developed a dedicated mobile app for professional drivers to enhance their truck stop experience.
Building resilience in unstable conditions requires informed decision making. But legacy operating models often lack the agility to respond quickly to change.
Making better and faster decisions in oil and gas is all about data. Accessing it. Sharing it. Analyzing it. Supported by the right technology. When the right people have the right data at the right time, they can make smarter business decisions.
Oil and gas companies certainly don’t lack data. But too often it is fragmented across different functions. Customer data exists in multiple places, across different CRM systems. Operational data is stored in disparate systems of record, designed for specific purposes. Consequently, multiple versions of the truth exist across the value chain, so there’s no common understanding of market trends, customer needs, and operational pressures.
By creating a unified data ecosystem, where everyone works to the same standards and practices, you can start unearthing real insights that feed smarter decisions. For example, the ability to integrate market data with production stats can provide valuable context for traders, helping them decide what to buy and when to sell.
Building a strong data ecosystem can quickly lead to predictive capabilities that improve operations. By combining market information, IoT data, and cross-departmental reports with machine learning, companies can react to both short- and long-term changes.
For example, decision-support tools can provide real-time availability of alternative suppliers during times of disruption. Analytics can help sense when physical assets need maintenance, or when there will be a shift in customer demand.
Across the oil and gas value chain, a unified, predictive data ecosystem can result in some hugely transformational capabilities:
Customer convenience can be transformed too. A better understanding of needs and preferences is helping retailers to develop a range of innovative products and services, such as:
From an ESG perspective, a connected data ecosystem provides the transparency that customers, investors, and regulators demand—resulting in:
Here are some real-world examples of how Publicis Sapient and Microsoft are helping companies use data to transform the experience.
A dedicated mobile app for professional drivers enhances the truck stop experience. Features include real-time lane status updates (e.g., Not Ready, Fueling, Done, Ready), location-based services, and the ability to start fueling directly from the app.
The loading and unloading of a moored vessel typically requires schedulers, operators, and VCO analysts to gather information from multiple systems. Assessing all of this data takes time, which can incur costly demurrage fees. To accelerate the scheduling process, we developed a digital wharf assistant for one company that allows their users to ask natural language questions using voice or text via Cortana and Microsoft Teams. The assistant delivers the required information back to users in a summarized form, which minimizes errors, reduces their learning curve, and improves vessel scheduling. As a result, the company is saving $1M in demurrage fees per year.
A global energy company has partnered with Publicis Sapient to build an end-to-end value chain optimization platform, transforming everything from crude acquisition to customer service. Built on the Microsoft Azure cloud, the platform pulls data from all of the company’s transactional, finance, account, and operational systems into one big data lake. From this, the platform creates curated data bricks and data warehouses which enable application interaction, visualization, and reporting. Ultimately, the goal is to create a self-serving platform that enables the global energy company to make data-informed decisions, leading to lower operational costs and increased revenues.
To help schedulers optimize the nomination cut process and maximize throughput, we’ve helped a leading pipeline operator implement a data-driven, cloud-based analytics solution. This uses machine learning to capture anomalous customer behavior and predict the final nominated volume within 90% accuracy, along with any volume imbalances. Linear modeling techniques help determine the nomination cut order and volume, which helps maintain maximum pipeline throughput and system balance, while strictly adhering to user-provided constraints. The insights and additional throughput generated by the model have helped the operator generate savings of $100M.
We have worked with the largest diesel fuel retailer in the US to implement a new business model for the supply and trading of bio-diesel and renewable identification numbers (RINS). This has helped reduce the complexity of its transactions, resulting in higher business value and simpler management of profit and loss. We provided strategic direction to model the new business process, and then built the solution on a scalable architecture that enabled multiple different acquisitions to be integrated quickly. We also customized and configured a system of record for the entire business, including connectivity to IoT-based devices to enable real-time inventory reporting. This has helped optimize the firm’s fuel supply, which totals more than 7 billion gallons per year.
In the state of Texas, USA, 90% of oil and gas emissions come from just 10% of facilities—suggesting that a small number of “super-emitting” sites have major leaks. Via Microsoft Power BI, we have enabled local operators to overlay infrared satellite imagery from the European Space Agency on their production assets, so they can visualize the precise location of methane flaring and leaks. Using satellite imagery to narrow the search for leaks in this way helps protect and optimize the use of high-cost assets, i.e., people and equipment. In addition to identifying where emissions occur, Azure ML helps eliminate flaring with pipeline capacity and Dynamics 365 schedules repairs with technicians to mitigate further environmental impact.
Together, Microsoft and Publicis Sapient have vast experience in the oil and gas sector. Publicis Sapient offers deep business domain expertise via our team of Oil & Gas experts who have decades of sector experience. We use a methodology based on three interlinked capabilities—customer experience, strategy and consulting, and technology execution—and our approach is always collaborative and agile. We believe this is the only way to achieve true digital business transformation in an accelerated and effective manner.
Microsoft is a long-term, trusted technology partner of Publicis Sapient, with a mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We offer secure cloud and intelligent edge capabilities on the Azure platform, which provides complete flexibility and control of your data and applications. Innovative tools like the Power Platform and Power BI make it simple to analyze data, build solutions, automate processes, and create virtual agents—without technical expertise. This empowers people to generate actionable insights and make better business decisions.
Combining bespoke design and implementation capabilities with best-in-class cloud technology, we can help strengthen resilience and build intelligence across your supply chain.
Together, we can build your roadmap to a more resilient and intelligent supply chain. Please get in touch to schedule a workshop with our team.
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