Laurel: On that matter of office agility. In 2020, bp started a reorganization that consolidated its procurement departments into that single international 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 giant international 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 large they have been. And in that enterprise, they’ve the ERP techniques, 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 grow to be throughout a few of these a number of enterprise items, that has your knowledge in all of those enterprise techniques.
So, if you wish to create a report, then it is actually difficult as a result of it’s important to not solely go to those totally different techniques, however the taxonomy of the info 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 need a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually laborious, and in addition the reviews may not 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 amount 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 greater demand.
Laurel: Nicely, talking of automation, it could 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 strategy to your ongoing transformation?
Raimundo: So, immediately, all people talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be trustworthy with you, I feel your journey actually begins somewhat bit earlier. I feel after we exit and take into consideration this superior know-how, which clearly, have their place, I feel at first, what you really want to focus is in your foundational, and that’s your knowledge. So, you ask concerning the position of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve got completed is all the knowledge used to reside in a number of totally different websites on the market. So, what we’ve got completed is all the info 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 knowledge transformation occurred in a single spot. And what that does can also be enable our customers that want this knowledge to go to a single supply of fact and never be pulling knowledge from a number of techniques. An instance of the chaos that that creates is any individual shall be pulling bill and knowledge from Spence, any individual will pull in PayData. So, then you have already got knowledge discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized device the place all people goes for the info reduces a lot complexity on the system.
Laurel: And talking about that type of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement techniques made it tough to take care of high quality compliance as properly, and in addition to manufacturing monitoring in bp provide chain. So, what are among the most difficult facets of realizing this new imaginative and prescient with a centralized one-stop platform?
Raimundo: Yeah, we’ve got listing in there. So, let me break it into possibly technical and other people, as a result of I feel individuals is one thing that we should always speak about it. So, technical. I feel one of many largest issues in technical is working together with your technical staff to search out the proper 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 proper instruments. I am going to 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 unimaginable functions on the market. However at this level, RPA actually wasn’t the device for us given the modifications 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.
