With a 140-year history, Chevron Corporation is one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies. Through its subsidiaries that conduct business worldwide, the company is involved in virtually every facet of the energy industry.
Chevron invests in technology to push energy’s frontiers and mobilizes its workforce to solve the most complex challenges and explore new possibilities. This is critical in every aspect of its business as the company meets the demand for affordable, reliable and ever cleaner energy that fuels human progress.
A long-time user of the SAP ERP application, Chevron’s IT team knows the future of business is in the cloud and has been rapidly evolving to tap into the benefits cloud can bring.
Amy Absher, Chevron’s Manager of Enterprise Systems and Services, explained at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference, “Everybody is working to push the envelope and build new solutions that bring the business real-time actionable insights—and we have to do it as efficiently as possible. As we’ve shifted to cloud, we’ve been able to free people up to focus on higher impact work, deliver value faster and lower our total cost of ownership.”
Having worked at Chevron for more than 35 years, Absher has unique insight into the evolution of the company’s enterprise technology. As business leaders and IT work closer than ever before, teams are harnessing big data and applying analytics across the entire business rather than traditional silos. “There is a huge opportunity for us to bring together financial data from ERP systems and marry that with operational data from reservoir management solutions, well systems, and more to drive innovation and increase efficiency, insight, and profitability.”
Chevron is working to migrate a complex ERP environment to the cloud, along with other business-critical workflows. It is essential that SAP develops industry-relevant and industry-specific solutions that customers like Chevron need to make the transition successful.
This is why SAP formed a consortium of seven oil and gas companies and Accenture to develop industry-defined market standards for a cloud ERP solution based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Already the chair for the SAP Advisory Council for Oil and Gas, Absher is highly active in the consortium, and Chevron is a key co-innovation contributor. As SAP incorporates intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so on into back-office processes, Chevron is at the table to help evaluate the technology and mature it to a point where a cloud-based software-as-a-service model can work for oil and gas companies on a large corporate scale.
Absher makes it clear, however, that this is not just about building a solution for Chevron – it’s about building a solution for the entire industry.
Working with other oil and gas companies on the council and as part of the consortium, she has seen first-hand how this type of co-innovation benefits everyone. “We’ve learned the large majority of our core workflows are basically the same, making best practices easy to spot,” she explains. “By working together across the industry, we can identify what a standard process should look like, then work with SAP to build those into the core components of the SAP solution.”
As Chevron works with SAP, Accenture, and its industry peers to move oil and gas operations into the future, it is also clarifying its own IT road map.
In evaluating its own move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud–from deciding whether to opt for a single- or multi-tenant cloud to planning for the complexity of an interim hybrid environment–Absher explains that, “being informed through the consortium is helping us anticipate and get ahead of change.”
Although the road may be long, the value of a cloud transformation is clear. From simplifying the IT environment to driving efficiency through automation, Chevron expects to see increases in productivity and decreases in costs across the business. The advantages of cloud for Absher and her team will be far less time spent on managing hardware installations, automation capabilities, and other routine transactional work, freeing up money and people to work on higher value opportunities.
SAP is benefitting from the collaboration as well. Working with customers like Chevron gives its development teams the insight to build better software. As Absher points out, “New solutions are popping up in the market every day. We are here to help make sure SAP solutions deliver the capabilities the industry needs.”
“At the end of the day, we’re all in this together.”
To see the entire video of Absher, click
here.
To find out more about how SAP is working to innovate for oil and gas companies, visit us at
www.sap.com/oilandgas.
