Energy companies are facing multiple macroeconomic headwinds, and the pressure to cut costs is growing.
Supply chain costs are a growing concern, with companies trying to shorten their supply lines and minimise the risk of not getting products on time. Energy companies are also struggling with recruitment, as concerns about sustainability make many young people hesitant to pursue careers in the field. There is no silver bullet for these challenges, but there are ways to cut costs and drive efficiency, often buried inside the mountains of data generated by their operations, from drill sites to petrol stations. Process Intelligence reveals where value is trapped in a company’s processes, enabling process optimisation and fostering genuine growth in the oil and gas industry.
Uncovering the potential
Process Intelligence optimises both upstream and downstream operations by analysing ‘event logs’ from the systems that run business processes like asset management, supply chain, oil and gas production, procure to pay, and offer to cash. Process Intelligence acts like a dynamic MRI-scan across the whole business. It creates a living ‘digital twin’ of business operations, uncovering hidden value opportunities in everything from invoicing to maintenance. Such understanding is a vital part of the oil and gas industry’s efforts to digitise and break down silos within their organisations to drive efficiency. Process Intelligence also gives AI the process data and business context it needs to be effective for the enterprise. By combining both technologies, energy companies can prepare for a smarter future.
Energy Transition
For oil and gas companies, the transition to ‘greener’ energy is a challenge that looms ever larger. The sector is being asked to improve the sustainability of its own operations and those of its suppliers in the short term, as well as prioritising the sale of lower-emission energy sources through retail networks over the long term. Tools such as McKinsey’s marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) can help identify cost-effective ways to decarbonise. These, however, still require a lot of manual analysis and work to extract the relevant information.
Data needed to operationalise sustainability strategies are often spread across a complex landscape of systems, people and processes. Process Intelligence provides businesses with the real-time insights to measure, report and improve these metrics. It can be the connective tissue that unites sustainability data across the business, creating a single source of truth that supports decision making in logistics planning, distribution planning, material sourcing.
Extending life
Aging infrastructure is a major challenge throughout the oil and gas supply chain. When we speak to customers, managing the integrity and safety of the infrastructure is always among their top priorities. As oil companies become more selective about pursuing new drilling opportunities, keeping existing assets in operational condition has become more crucial than ever. Process Intelligence helps oil and gas organisations streamline maintenance processes, reduce costly downtime, and move toward an AI-powered predictive, data-driven future.
Plant maintenance depends on upstream processes such as inventory management and procurement. Process Intelligence can offer leaders in the sector insight into how these might affect servicing schedules. It can also optimise work scheduling and task allocation, helping to boost technician efficiency, and help leaders stay informed about the causes of unscheduled maintenance and the reasons for delays, paving the way for predictive maintenance. Process Intelligence shows the integration between complex, interconnected processes, systems and teams. By breaking down silos, business leaders can align material planning and labour estimates to reduce costs and ensure production uptime is uninterrupted across teams, organisations, systems and processes.
Optimising operational spend
In the face of long term decarbonisation, drilling locations can become increasingly difficult to source, which means oil exploration and drilling must be expertly efficient, to make the most of upstream operations. Leaders in the sector must uphold a high standard of efficiency, focusing on reducing costs and preventing cash leakage.
A key part of this is automation. There has been a surge in investment across the industry, and Process Intelligence is key to ensuring internal processes can be automated effectively. It provides a holistic view of business operations, pinpointing the root causes of process bottlenecks, such as invoicing, even across complex product ranges. For example, Process Intelligence can automatically identify old unbilled orders to help accelerate invoicing, while also checking that customers are always paying full invoice amounts. At the other end of the Cash-to-Cash cycle, Process Intelligence and AI can be used to identify duplicate invoices, missed discounts, contract leakage, and forgotten vendor credit notes.
Tracking bottlenecks
In the supply chain, complex planning and frequent changes can cause inventory to pile up, a major issue which can impact working capital. Businesses often operate across multiple geographies, which can make it difficult to ascertain a real-time end-to-end picture of inventory. Without a holistic picture of the business, they can’t improve end-to-end operations, as bottlenecks need to be identified before they can even be addressed. Well known oil and gas companies have reduced spare part inventory with Process Intelligence by improving the processes leading to the excess inventory.
Previously, oil and gas companies relied on manual operational reports, which tended to take large amounts of time and effort, and make it difficult to drive through process improvements.
Full visibility into how processes are running enables business leaders to track inefficiencies in real time, develop improvement plans, and implement them. In this way, Process Intelligence can boost cash flow by offering a real-time overview of replenishment and consumption trend data, which can help business leaders update safety stocks exactly where they are required.
A smarter future
In a sector facing mounting pressure from economic uncertainty, ageing infrastructure, and the urgent need for sustainability, oil and gas companies must embrace smarter, data-driven approaches to remain competitive. Process Intelligence helps them uncover inefficiencies, streamline operations, and drive down costs across the value chain – from maintenance and procurement to invoicing and inventory management. By shifting from static reports to a platform that provides real-time insights and the ability to act on them, industry leaders can not only improve performance today but also lay the groundwork for a more resilient, sustainable, and future-ready organisation.
About the Author
Diederick Badon Ghijben is Industry Principal, Oil & Gas at Celonis. Celonis makes processes work for people, companies, and the planet. The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform takes the data from the systems you already use, and presents you with a living digital twin of your end-to-end processes. It’s system-agnostic, without bias, and provides everyone with a common language for understanding and improving processes. Because when processes work, everything works.
