MULTINATIONALS Accenture and SAP beefed up their partnership by developing two innovative digital solutions to help oil-and-gas companies enhance their bottom line.
These new offerings will bring increased downstream operating margins with mitigated risk and increased upstream production with lower costs.
For one, the Connected Hydrocarbons Logistics (CHL) solution will give real-time total inventory of oil-and-gas firms’ hydrocarbon supply chain.
“The hydrocarbon value chain is at the heart of the downstream business, and today’s fragmented and often outdated IT [information-technology] landscape prevents oil-and-gas companies from unlocking all of the available value,” said Andrew Smart, managing director who leads Accenture’s energy practice.
Cloud networking will link companies with suppliers and partners, maximizing hydrocarbon supply-chain movements, visibility into secondary costs and reducing working capital.
Using the latest SAP technologies, such as SAP S/4HANA software and SAP HANA cloud platform, together with the role-based SAP Fiori user experience, CHL will complement and improve the capabilities of SAP for oil-and-gas industry solutions and other SAP solutions with end-to-end visibility with real-time analytics and improved supply and demand planning.
Accenture and SAP will also expand their Upstream Production Operations collaboration that gives solutions and services supporting the upstream operations value chain, including Upstream Operations Management, SAP UOM and Accenture’s rapid-deployment upstream SAP S/4HANA template, Accenture Upstream Direct.
What’s more, the SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service solution is also being extended to provide early identification of potential asset performance issues.
This will allow upstream operators to improve production volumes, while lessening maintenance costs and planning.
“We look forward to working with SAP and our clients to use Connected Hydrocarbons Logistics to unlock this value by better managing changes in supply, demand and commodity prices. Similarly, the new predictive maintenance tool from SAP can help operators further enhance upstream operations, in an environment of sustained oil-price volatility,” Smart said.
The expanded innovation program, according to SAP Global Vice President for Oil and Gas Industry Ken Evans, will provide two key digital capabilities in demand from their customers, like a real-time view of all their product inventories, and the ability to predict asset failures and prescribe their best sequence of repair.
“Our digital readiness survey confirms that, while over 80 percent of the industry sees these capabilities as important, less than 5 percent have either of them today. Our collaboration with Accenture expands the portfolio of solutions delivering such digital transformations to the oil-and-gas industry,” he said.
As per their tie-up, Accenture and SAP will codevelop the new solutions built for SAP S/4HANA, with the participation of clients from both companies to ensure that specific industry needs are met.
In October 2016 they announced their collaboration to develop the next generation of predictive-analytics solutions for asset management in the utilities industry to enable condition-based maintenance.