Laurel: On that subject 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 offer you a extra context on that. So, if you consider bp being this actually massive international organizations divided in enterprise items, earlier than the organizations, each considered one of 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 methods, 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 turn out to be throughout a few of these a number of enterprise items, that has your information in all of those enterprise methods.
So, if you wish to create a report, then it is actually difficult as a result of it’s important to not solely go to those completely different methods, however the taxonomy of the info is completely 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 would like a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually laborious, and likewise the stories won’t be as full as they’re. So, that actually requires some instruments that we have to put in place to help that. And on prime of that, the amount of requests now’s so better that simply altering and including steps to course of aren’t going to be sufficient. You actually need to look into automation to fulfill this greater demand.
Laurel: Nicely, talking of automation, it might probably leverage present 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, in the present day, all people talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be trustworthy 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 at first, what you really want to focus is in your foundational, and that’s your information. So, you ask concerning the function of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve achieved is all the information used to reside in a number of completely different websites on the market. So, what we’ve achieved is all the info 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’ll be able to create one other column and say, okay, now name it, no matter, United States, or nonetheless you wish to name it.
So, all of this information transformation occurred in a single spot. And what that does can also be enable our customers that want this information to go to a single supply of reality and never be pulling information from a number of methods. An instance of the chaos that that creates is someone might be pulling bill and information from Spence, someone will pull in PayData. So, then you have already got information discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized software the place all people goes for the info reduces a lot complexity on the system.
Laurel: And talking about that type of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement methods made it tough to keep up high quality compliance as properly, and in addition to manufacturing monitoring in bp provide chain. So, what are among the most difficult points of realizing this new imaginative and prescient with a centralized one-stop platform?
Raimundo: Yeah, we’ve checklist in there. So, let me break it into perhaps technical and other people, as a result of I believe folks is one thing that we must always speak about it. So, technical. I believe one of many greatest issues in technical is working together with your technical staff to search out the fitting structure. That is how your imaginative and prescient matches into our structure, which can create much less, to illustrate, confusion and complexity into your structure. And the opposite facet of the technical problem is discovering the fitting instruments. I am going to provide you with an instance for our mission. 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 unbelievable purposes on the market. However at this level, RPA actually wasn’t the software for us given the adjustments that would 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.
