A lead­ing ener­gy trans­porta­tion and mid­stream ser­vice provider that’s served North America’s ener­gy indus­try for more than 65 years, Pem­bi­na Pipeline Cor­po­ra­tion owns an inte­grat­ed net­work of pipelines that trans­port hydro­car­bon liq­uids and nat­ur­al gas prod­ucts pro­duced pri­mar­i­ly in West­ern Canada.

With oper­a­tions across the hydro­car­bon val­ue chain, Pem­bi­na owns gas gath­er­ing and pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties, oil and nat­ur­al gas liq­uids infra­struc­ture and logis­tics ser­vices, and a grow­ing export ter­mi­nals busi­ness. Com­mit­ted to deliv­er­ing ener­gy solu­tions that con­nect pro­duc­ers and con­sumers around the world, Pem­bi­na empha­sizes safe­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty across its inte­grat­ed val­ue chain, in sup­port of a more sus­tain­able future.

Con­stant­ly evolv­ing by lever­ag­ing advanced tech­nolo­gies that inte­grate with its busi­ness process­es, Pem­bi­na recent­ly adopt­ed both SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud (SAC) to trans­form into a data-lit­er­ate orga­ni­za­tion oper­at­ing at the inter­sec­tion of actions and insights. Accord­ing to Anitha Swami­nathan, Super­vi­sor for SAP Report­ing and Ana­lyt­ics at Pem­bi­na, the resul­tant effi­cien­cies have changed the way data is used at Pem­bi­na to dri­ve busi­ness outcomes.

“In the past, users couldn’t get every­thing they were look­ing for from one point of entry,” Swami­nathan told ASUG. ​“That was the begin­ning of the jour­ney we’ve under­tak­en in the last cou­ple of years, to trans­form and become more dig­i­tal­ly dri­ven, data-focused, and data-centric.”

Dig­i­tal­ly Dri­ven, Data-Focused, and Data-Centric

Though Pem­bi­na’s his­to­ry with SAP tech­nol­o­gy dates back to its ear­ly years, the com­pa­ny first imple­ment­ed SAP S/4HANA in 2018, gain­ing effi­cien­cies as a result. Even so, employ­ees faced chal­lenges dri­ving insights at every lev­el of the orga­ni­za­tion, giv­en that data was dis­persed across sys­tems and lines of business. 

His­tor­i­cal­ly, Pem­bi­na busi­ness users com­piled data offline or in a non-inte­grat­ed report­ing tool to make informed deci­sions. The busi­ness relied on tech­nol­o­gy resources to pull data for ad-hoc requests and to build cus­tom reports. Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty was lost due to the effort required to con­sol­i­date reports, and tech­nol­o­gy teams were required to gen­er­ate bespoke report­ing due to vary­ing lev­els of exper­tise with report­ing tools across resources. 

With­in the past two years, Pem­bi­na has enabled a new, mod­ern­ized, and future-proof SAP Ana­lyt­ics archi­tec­ture to lead the next phas­es of its dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The first key mod­ern­iza­tion was intro­duc­ing SAP Land­scape Trans­for­ma­tion Repli­ca­tion Serv­er (SLT) repli­ca­tion — a trig­ger-based data repli­ca­tion method in HANA sys­tems — from S/4HANA to BW/4HANA, enabling real-time report­ing capa­bil­i­ties and giv­ing busi­ness users the abil­i­ty to see the impact of their changes in the source sys­tem imme­di­ate­ly in ana­lyt­ics and gain action­able insights. 

The sec­ond mod­ern­iza­tion was the intro­duc­tion of SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud dash­boards to pull data from mul­ti­ple sources, pro­vid­ing end users with one plat­form for their busi­ness insights. The self-ser­vice com­po­nent of SAC allowed users to mon­i­tor insights in real time. 

SAC became a one-stop-shop for SAP ana­lyt­ics at Pem­bi­na, with links to SAP Analy­sis for Microsoft Office (AO) reports allow­ing Pem­bi­na’s team to dive deep­er and slice and dice data. Last­ly, the inte­gra­tion of oth­er SAP Cloud plat­forms like Suc­cess­Fac­tors, Ari­ba, and Con­cur, along with oth­er non-SAP sys­tems, has pro­vid­ed Pem­bi­na with the abil­i­ty to gain deep­er insights across mul­ti­ple SAP and non-SAP sys­tems data.

As Swami­nathan will dis­cuss at the ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Oil, Gas & Ener­gy con­fer­ence (Sep­tem­ber 14 – 15; in Dal­las, TX), Pembina’s invest­ment in SAC not only empow­ered self-ser­vice report­ing but improved col­lab­o­ra­tion between teams through its user-friend­ly inter­face. SAP’s secu­ri­ty mod­el, mean­while, kept data safe and ensured qual­i­ty self-ser­vice data.

While Azure Data­bricks and Microsoft Pow­er BI made up two addi­tion­al ana­lyt­ics streams at Pem­bi­na, SAP BW/4HANA now serves as the company’s core busi­ness ware­house plat­form for all SAP report­ing, feed­ing data to all the dash­boards estab­lished through SAC. By con­sol­i­dat­ing lega­cy BW sys­tems and migrat­ing reports from oth­er areas to that cen­tral ware­house sys­tem, Pem­bi­na has built the major­i­ty of its data foun­da­tions with­in SAP BW/4HANA. From that point, it’s been more achiev­able for Swaminathan’s team — which is focused on pro­vid­ing enter­prise-wide report­ing — to build data mod­els robust enough to answer any busi­ness ques­tion and enable self-ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties across the organization. 

Effi­cien­cies and Outcomes

Pembina’s suc­cess­ful roll-out of SAC, togeth­er with its invest­ment in SAP BW/4HANA, has enabled the com­pa­ny to estab­lish a com­mon plat­form for busi­ness users and make it acces­si­ble through a mod­ern, visu­al inter­face, unlock­ing action­able insights with real-time data and bal­anc­ing self-ser­vice demand for ad-hoc report cre­ation and exploration.

After rolling out SAC, Pem­bi­na report­ed a 99% year-over-year increase in its SAC view­er­ship and a 350% increase in its SAC and AO user base from 2020.

In advis­ing oth­er com­pa­nies pur­su­ing sim­i­lar data ana­lyt­ics trans­for­ma­tion, Swami­nathan stressed the impor­tance of part­ner­ing with busi­ness lead­ers rather than keep­ing ini­tia­tives IT-led. ​“We moved in lock­step with the busi­ness to keep them involved,” she said. ​“With IT-dri­ven projects, there can be push­back, and change man­age­ment becomes dif­fi­cult after you can invest all this mon­ey; it defeats the pur­pose if peo­ple don’t use the tools and tech­nol­o­gy or find val­ue. Busi­ness engage­ment was key.” 

Over­all, Pembina’s jour­ney has required an agile approach to project man­age­ment and exe­cu­tion. Swami­nathan added that the 80 – 20 rule, assert­ing that 80% of out­comes result from 20% of all caus­es for a giv­en event, was use­ful to con­sid­er and allowed Pem­bi­na to pri­or­i­tize its most poten­tial­ly pro­duc­tive activ­i­ties in trans­for­ma­tion projects. 

“We took an agile approach to imple­ment­ing the report­ing solu­tions by break­ing the over­all busi­ness require­ments into mul­ti­ple, month­ly releas­es rather than one big go-live,” Swami­nathan said. From there, teams would con­tin­ue to put reports into pro­duc­tion, test them, train super-users to go out and social­ize dash­boards with wider groups, then solic­it feed­back to inform future releas­es. ​“It’s been an iter­a­tive approach, and that’s worked very well for us,” she said. 

More­over, the focus on change man­age­ment and train­ing for each stream has enabled users across Pem­bi­na to lever­age the self-ser­vice tools to bet­ter under­stand and share insights. A com­mu­ni­ty of users at Pem­bi­na has been estab­lished and con­tin­ues to grow. With live, record­ed, and doc­u­ment­ed train­ing avail­able, users can devel­op their own acu­men to find, run, book­mark, share, and even cre­ate their own sto­ries in SAC.

“With­in Pem­bi­na, we’re mov­ing toward a hub-and-spoke oper­at­ing mod­el,” Swami­nathan said. ​“IT still takes care of the data gov­er­nance and makes sure you build data mod­els in a way more eas­i­ly adopt­ed by every­one across Pem­bi­na, as opposed to siloed groups of users.”

To that end, Pem­bi­na estab­lished a set of small­er ana­lyt­ics teams, which assist with change man­age­ment around the adop­tion and use of SAC and oth­er SAP sys­tems. ​“That’s help­ing with data lit­er­a­cy,” she said. ​“Those teams advo­cate for the use of SAC as a tech­nol­o­gy plat­form, which is help­ing us get to where we want to be.”

Reflect­ing on the over­all jour­ney, Swami­nathan adds that ​“Pem­bi­na’s uncom­mon approach to mak­ing sure we mea­sure the uti­liza­tion of what we build, and ensure end users are get­ting val­ue, has been a key to our success.” 

For more on Pem­bi­na’s jour­ney with SAP Ana­lyt­ics, attend the ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Oil, Gas & Ener­gy con­fer­ence (Sept. 14 – 15; in Dal­las, TX; reg­is­ter here).