Laurel: On that matter of office agility. In 2020, bp started a reorganization that consolidated its procurement departments into that single international procurement group. What had been the challenges that resulted from this reorganization?
Raimundo: Yeah. To provide you a extra context on that. So, if you concentrate on bp being this actually massive international organizations divided in enterprise items, earlier than the organizations, each one among these enterprise items have their very own procurement departments, which deal with actually billions of {dollars} that’s how large they had been. And in that enterprise, they’ve the ERP techniques, your contract repository, your course of and course of deviation. However you solely handle the portfolio to that. When you combine all of these organizations right into a single one, now your duty change into throughout a few of these a number of enterprise items, that has your knowledge in all of those enterprise techniques.
So, if you wish to create a report, then it is actually difficult as a result of it’s a must to not solely go to those totally different techniques, however the taxonomy of the information is totally different. So, an instance, some enterprise will name their territory, North America, the opposite one will name it east and west coast. So, if you’d like a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually arduous, and likewise the stories may not be as full as they’re. So, that basically requires some instruments that we have to put in place to assist that. And on prime of that, the quantity of requests now could be so better that simply altering and including steps to course of aren’t going to be sufficient. You really want to look into automation to fulfill this increased demand.
Laurel: Nicely, talking of automation, it will probably leverage current know-how and construct efficiencies. So, what’s the function of superior applied sciences, like AI, machine studying and superior analytics within the strategy to your ongoing transformation?
Raimundo: So, at present, everyone talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be sincere with you, I believe your journey actually begins a bit bit earlier. I believe once we exit and take into consideration this superior know-how, which clearly, have their place, I believe to start with, what you actually need to focus is in your foundational, and that’s your knowledge. So, you ask concerning the function of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve got achieved is the entire knowledge used to reside in a number of totally different websites on the market. So, what we’ve got achieved is all the information now has been migrated to the cloud. After which what the cloud additionally permits is to do transformations in place that assist us actually homogenize, what I simply described earlier than, North America, South America, then you possibly can create one other column and say, okay, now name it, no matter, United States, or nonetheless you need to name it.
So, all of this knowledge transformation occurred in a single spot. And what that does can be permit our customers that want this knowledge to go to a single supply of fact and never be pulling knowledge from a number of techniques. An instance of the chaos that that creates is any person will probably be pulling bill and knowledge from Spence, any person will pull in PayData. So, then you have already got knowledge discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized software the place everyone goes for the information reduces a lot complexity on the system.
Laurel: And talking about that sort of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement techniques made it tough to take care of high quality compliance as properly, and in addition to manufacturing monitoring in bp provide chain. So, what are a number of the most difficult features of realizing this new imaginative and prescient with a centralized one-stop platform?
Raimundo: Yeah, we’ve got an excellent checklist in there. So, let me break it into perhaps technical and folks, as a result of I believe individuals is one thing that we must always discuss it. So, technical. I believe one of many largest issues in technical is working together with your technical crew to search out the suitable structure. That is how your imaginative and prescient suits into our structure, which is able to create much less, as an example, confusion and complexity into your structure. And the opposite facet of the technical problem is discovering the suitable instruments. I am going to offer you an instance for our challenge. Initially, I believed, okay, RPA [robotic process automation] would be the know-how to do that. So, we run a pilot RPA. And clearly, RPA has unimaginable purposes on the market. However at this level, RPA actually wasn’t the software for us given the adjustments that might occur on the screens from the system that we’re utilizing. So, then we determined as a substitute of going to RPA, going to API.
