Laurel: On that subject of office agility. In 2020, bp started a reorganization that consolidated its procurement departments into that single world procurement group. What have been the challenges that resulted from this reorganization?
Raimundo: Yeah. To present you a extra context on that. So, if you concentrate on bp being this actually massive world organizations divided in enterprise models, earlier than the organizations, each certainly one of these enterprise models have their very own procurement departments, which deal with actually billions of {dollars} that’s how large they have been. And in that enterprise, they’ve the ERP programs, 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 accountability turn out to be throughout a few of these a number of enterprise models, that has your information in all of those enterprise programs.
So, if you wish to create a report, then it is actually difficult as a result of you need to not solely go to those completely different programs, however the taxonomy of the information 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, in order for you a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually arduous, and likewise the stories won’t be as full as they’re. So, that basically requires some instruments that we have to put in place to help that. And on prime of that, the quantity of requests now’s so higher 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 greater demand.
Laurel: Effectively, talking of automation, it may possibly leverage current know-how and construct efficiencies. So, what’s the position of superior applied sciences, like AI, machine studying and superior analytics within the method to your ongoing transformation?
Raimundo: So, immediately, all people talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be sincere with you, I feel your journey actually begins just a little bit earlier. I feel once we exit and take into consideration this superior know-how, which clearly, have their place, I feel to start with, what you actually need to focus is in your foundational, and that’s your information. So, you ask concerning the position of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve carried out is the entire information used to reside in a number of completely different websites on the market. So, what we’ve carried out 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 nevertheless you need 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 fact and never be pulling information from a number of programs. An instance of the chaos that that creates is any individual will probably be pulling bill and information from Spence, any individual will pull in PayData. So, then you have already got information discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized instrument the place all people goes for the information reduces a lot complexity on the system.
Laurel: And talking about that type of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement programs made it tough to take care of high quality compliance as effectively, 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 checklist in there. So, let me break it into possibly technical and folks, as a result of I feel folks is one thing that we should always discuss it. So, technical. I feel one of many largest issues in technical is working along with your technical group to seek out the best structure. That is how your imaginative and prescient suits into our structure, which is able to create much less, as an instance, confusion and complexity into your structure. And the opposite aspect of the technical problem is discovering the best instruments. I will provide you with an instance for our venture. Initially, I assumed, okay, RPA [robotic process automation] would be the know-how to do that. So, we run a pilot RPA. And clearly, RPA has unbelievable functions on the market. However at this level, RPA actually wasn’t the instrument for us given the adjustments that would occur on the screens from the system that we’re utilizing. So, then we determined as an alternative of going to RPA, going to API.