Many companies in the energy sector — from oil and gas to utilities — are placing renewed focus on improving their end-to-end processes. However, the diverse operating units, growing product portfolios and ongoing regulatory requirements provide fundamental challenges to process understanding and optimization. Existing applications like ERP or e-procurement help manage parts of processes, but do not extend outside of their operational silos.

BPM Opportunity

Energy companies are using BPM to manage diverse processes — from end-to-end procurement to pay to resolving billing disputes. The benefits they hope to achieve by deploying process-centric applications using BPM include:

• Enable collaboration across and beyond the enterprise. Automatic work routing and notifications across groups, partners, and customers reduces the time, errors and complexity of executing processes.
• Enable Straight-Through Processing. Business rules in processes can help automate the routing and processing of tasks — often reducing the amount of human intervention needed by over 80%.
• Gain real-time visibility and control over processes. Managers can view real-time process performance and proactively manage bottlenecks.
• Extend the value and life of core systems. Leverage existing applications by reading and posting transactions while introducing more efficient Web-based forms and interfaces.
• Ensure that the process that is documented — is the process that is executed. Process models that actually run the process provide consistency, adherence and audit trails to ensure compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Respond to change faster. Revise processes to respond to organization or regulatory changes — in days, if necessary.

Lombardi In Action

One oil and gas company is using BPM to manage the collection and approval of oil reserve information for financial reporting. With the increased level of oversight required by Sarbanes-Oxley as well as industry regulations, the BPM solution plays a key role in helping the company gather information from diverse systems, manage the necessary approvals and keep a detailed audit report of all process steps. Through automation and integration, the process has been streamlined while dramatically improving the consistency of process execution and simplifying the production of audit reports.