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 consider bp being this actually massive world 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 huge 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 duty change into throughout a few of these a number of enterprise items, that has your information in all of those enterprise programs.

So, if you wish to create a report, then it is actually sophisticated as a result of you need to not solely go to those totally different programs, 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 would like a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually exhausting, and likewise the experiences won’t be as full as they’re. So, that actually requires some instruments that we have to put in place to assist that. And on high of that, the quantity of requests now could be so higher 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 increased demand.

Laurel: Nicely, talking of automation, it will probably leverage current expertise 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, at this time, all people talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be sincere with you, I feel your journey actually begins a little bit bit earlier. I feel after we exit and take into consideration this superior expertise, 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 in regards to the position of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve got carried out is the entire information used to reside in a number of totally different websites on the market. So, what we’ve got 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 may 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 be permit 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 device the place all people goes for the information reduces a lot complexity on the system.

Laurel: And talking about that form of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement programs made it troublesome to keep up high quality compliance as effectively, and in addition to manufacturing monitoring in bp provide chain. So, what are among the most difficult elements of realizing this new imaginative and prescient with a centralized one-stop platform?

Raimundo: Yeah, we’ve got checklist in there. So, let me break it into perhaps technical and other people, as a result of I feel folks is one thing that we must always speak about it. So, technical. I feel one of many largest issues in technical is working along with your technical crew to search out the best structure. That is how your imaginative and prescient suits into our structure, which can create much less, as an instance, confusion and complexity into your structure. And the opposite facet of the technical problem is discovering the best instruments. I am going to offer you an instance for our venture. Initially, I assumed, okay, RPA [robotic process automation] would be the expertise 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 device 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.