Why process intelligence is the future of oil and gas. By Diederick Badon Ghijben
From rising costs to fragile supply chains and talent shortages – the energy industry is under pressure. There’s no quick fix, but the answers may already exist within their operations. Hidden in the data flowing from rigs to retail are insights that reveal inefficiencies and unlock growth. This is why process intelligence has the potential to be the key ingredient that can reinvigorate the sector, uncovering buried value, driving smarter and leaner performance for energy companies globally.
Connecting systems & unearthing value
Process intelligence optimizes both upstream and downstream operations by analyzing ‘event logs’ from the systems that run business processes like asset management, supply chain, oil and gas production, procure to pay, and offer to cash. This technology acts like a dynamic MRI-scan across the whole business. It creates a living ‘digital twin’ of business operations, uncovering hidden value opportunities in everything from invoicing to maintenance. Such understanding is a vital part of the oil and gas industry’s efforts to digitize and break down silos within their organizations to drive efficiency. Process intelligence also gives AI the process data and business context it needs to be effective for the enterprise. By combining both technologies, energy companies can prepare for a smarter future.
Driving sustainability
For oil and gas companies, the transition to ‘greener’ energy is a challenge that looms ever larger. The sector is being asked to improve the sustainability of its own operations and those of its suppliers in the short term, as well as prioritizing the sale of lower-emission energy sources through retail networks over the long term. Tools such as McKinsey’s marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) can help identify cost-effective ways to decarbonize. These, however, still require a lot of manual analysis and work to extract the relevant information.
The data needed to operationalize sustainability strategies is often spread across a complex landscape of systems, people and processes. Process intelligence provides businesses with real-time insights to measure, report and improve these metrics. It can be the connective tissue that unites sustainability data across the business, creating a single source of truth that supports decision making in logistics planning, distribution planning and material sourcing.
Perfecting maintenance
Aging infrastructure is a major challenge throughout the oil and gas supply chain. When we speak to customers, managing the integrity and safety of the infrastructure is always among their top priorities. As oil companies become more selective about pursuing new drilling opportunities, keeping existing assets in operational condition has become more crucial than ever. Process intelligence helps oil and gas organizations streamline maintenance processes, increasing production availability, and move toward an AI-powered predictive, data-driven future.
Plant maintenance depends on upstream processes such as inventory management and procurement. Process intelligence can offer leaders in the sector insight into how these might affect servicing schedules. It can also optimize work scheduling and task allocation, improve technician efficiency and effectiveness, and help leaders stay informed about the causes of unscheduled maintenance and the reasons for delays, paving the way for predictive and prescriptive maintenance. Process intelligence shows the integration between complex, interconnected processes, systems and teams. By breaking down silos, business leaders can align material planning and labor estimates to reduce costs and ensure production uptime is uninterrupted.
Harnessing investment
Harnessing investmentIn the face of long term decarbonization, drilling locations can become increasingly difficult to source, which means oil exploration and drilling must be expertly efficient, to make the most of upstream operations. Maintaining a high standard of operational excellence is crucial for industry leaders, particularly in the commissioning of capital assets where accelerating timelines and reducing risk are paramount.
A key part of this is automation. There has been a surge in investment across the industry, and process intelligence is key to ensuring internal processes can be automated effectively. Process intelligence provides a granular, holistic view of business operations, allowing companies to move beyond symptoms and pinpoint the root causes of process bottlenecks. In the context of commissioning, it can flag specific issues like delayed equipment, inefficient crew deployment, or suboptimal testing sequences ahead of first oil. For example, after identifying key inefficiencies in planning, scheduling, and supply chain execution, one application resulted in a more predictable and compressed project timeline.
At the other end of the cash-to-cash cycle, process intelligence and AI can be used to identify duplicate invoices, missed discounts, contract leakage, and managing customer ordering patterns leading to more effective and efficient usage of assets.
Reducing spare part inventory
In the supply chain, complex planning and frequent changes can cause inventory to pile up, a major issue which can impact working capital. Businesses often operate across multiple geographies, which can make it difficult to ascertain a real-time end-to-end picture of inventory. Without a holistic picture of the business, they can’t improve end-to-end operations, as bottlenecks need to be identified before they can even be addressed. Well-known oil and gas companies have reduced spare part inventory with process intelligence by improving the processes leading to the excess inventory.
Previously, oil and gas companies relied on manual operational reports, which tended to take large amounts of time and effort, and make it difficult to drive through process improvements. Full visibility into how processes are running enables business leaders to track inefficiencies in real time, develop improvement plans, and implement them. In this way, process intelligence can boost cash flow by offering a real-time overview of replenishment and consumption trend data, which can help business leaders update safety stocks exactly where they are required.
A smarter future
Amid economic headwinds, ageing assets, and growing calls for greener operations, the oil and gas industry stands at a crossroads. To thrive in this new era, companies must turn intelligence into action. Process intelligence transforms sprawling data into clarity – exposing hidden inefficiencies, optimizing processes, and cutting costs. By replacing static reports with dynamic, real-time insights, industry leaders can not only boost performance but also engineer a foundation for a more agile, sustainable and future-proof enterprise.
Diederick Badon Ghijben
Diederick Badon Ghijben is Industry Principal, Oil & Gas at Celonis. Celonis makes processes work for people, companies and the planet. The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform uses industry-leading process mining and AI technology and augments it with business context to give customers a living digital twin of their business operation. It’s system-agnostic and without bias and provides everyone with a common language for understanding and improving businesses. Celonis enables its customers to continuously realize significant value across the top, bottom, and green line.