Oil, gas, and energy leaders gathered in Houston earlier this month for ASUG Best Practices for Oil, Gas, and Energy, a destination event for organizations leveraging SAP technology across these industries.
ASUG hosted knowledge-sharing sessions that detailed tools for driving transformative results, while speakers from across the SAP user ecosystem went in-depth on their digital transformation projects and lessons learned.
In the Wednesday, Oct. 8 keynote, “From Data to Decisions: Customer-Led Strategies for SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), SAP Master Data Governance (MDG), and Data Transformation,” Carolyn Szczurek, ASUG Communications Lead, led a roundtable discussion with industry leaders who shared their real-world experiences, actionable advice around leveraging these solutions, and overall enterprise data strategy.
Advice from speakers emphasized starting small, whether related to gaining buy-in, rolling out change management, or establishing governance for data standardization initiatives. “We don’t want to boil the whole ocean, right?” said Priya Kesavulu, Data, AI, and Platforms Manager, ERP Transformation at Chevron — a sentiment echoed by her fellow customer speakers throughout the panel.
Along with Laxman Challa, Digital Transformation and Innovation Leader at Southwest Gas, and Aldo Leon, Director of IT Enterprise Applications Americas at Messer, Kesavulu imparted her real-world experience—and successes—with other SAP users in attendance, providing practical advice for those looking to improve their digital transformation strategy with SAP BTP.
These leaders and research from ASUG shared the following takeaways:
- Assign owners of data governance so guidelines and expectations are clear, both during the digital transformation project and for years to come.
- SAP BTP implementation should be the priority of not only IT, but also business units and leaders throughout the organization.
- Research from ASUG shows that SAP customers are finding value in SAP BTP in supporting their SAP S/4HANA digital transformation journeys.
- Starting small and with only a few owners first sets the stage for buy-in and a progressive rollout.
- Another way to gain buy-in with executives is showing the value of a technology implementation in how it affects business outcomes.
Where Is Your Organization in Its Data Maturity?
Because Chevron is very broad and uses both SAP and non-SAP systems, data strategies are evolving at different levels of maturity, Kesavulu said. The company is both establishing a foundation and simultaneously optimizing for innovation. But one thing is clear: its ERP data set is essential.
Starting its SAP journey about four and a half years back, Chevron just this year moved from its on-premises ERP to SAP S/4HANA on RISE with SAP. Users have been dealing with mainframes for 30 years, so this is a big shift internally, she said, both in terms of how to use the new system, but also in data management. “It’s not just a digital transformation; it’s how do we manage with the data that we have?” she said.
With 2.3 million customers in three different regions, a lot of care needs to go into the digital transformation and data quality in order to make the customer experience seamless and easy. To solve this, Kesavulu said that her team coordinated with business units to understand opportunities, pain points, and how business users envisioned their future processes. Based on that analysis, two outcomes were clear: Cross-functional workflows needed to be standardized, and the company needed to improve its data.
What Triggered Your Organizations to Focus on Data Strategy?
Improving data strategy can help a business level up its quality, but sometimes there is an inciting event or reason the organization seeks clean data.
Chevron’s data strategy improvement came out of its digital transformation efforts from leadership’s focus on digitalization, improving efficiency, increasing productivity, and migrating to the cloud. “We had a lot of data, but not a lot of information,” Kesavulu said.
For Leon at Messer, one of the triggers from the business standpoint was the COVID-19 pandemic. As an industrial gas company that supplies oxygen to hospitals, there was an immediate demand for its products. At the time, the company didn’t have an integrated system that could give business users real-time information on supply needs.
Each department at Messer was very siloed, with bookkeeping occurring in separate SQL, Access, or Excel documents. “The business said, ‘We cannot continue working like this,’” so it embarked on a journey to combine business and IT strategy to fix siloed information, lack of security, and to improve data standards, Leon said.
How Did You Ensure Your Organizations’ Data Governance Efforts Aligned with Business Outcomes?
Szczurek shared Prometheus Group-sponsored ASUG research on SAP S/4HANA adoption among its oil, gas, and energy industry members, finding that involving the business early and often is an ever-important piece of advice from those who have already migrated. Top challenges from these responses included inconsistent data across systems, lack of ownership or accountability, and limited data quality monitoring. The results are based on responses from 787 participants who are members of ASUG; 44 of those members are within the Oil, Gas, and Energy (OGE) industry.
The whole organization needs to be focused on data strategy, said Challa from Southwest Gas. “IT alone couldn’t do this,” he said. “Data is not just an IT asset. It is a shared asset between business units and IT.”
Southwest Gas operates in three states, each having its own set of data requests for regulatory and compliance needs. At the same time, the different lines of business also needed a single source of truth. Governance helps leaders in their data queries, and clear responsibilities are important for continuing to gather data for future needs.
Kesavulu echoed the need for leaders to clearly state who owns what data. Chevron leaders decided that data belongs to each business function—which also established data governance practices—and IT helps with data management processes.
But not everything needed to be standardized. Priority data elements were tied to specific business outcomes. For example, in Chevron’s asset management space, the master data that the team standardized is tied to the reliability and integrity metrics for its facilities.
Kesavulu’s team also identified information stewards from the business functions. “We do all the cleanup. We migrate it to our systems. Someone needs to own that quality going forward,” she said. “I’m so proud we have a very good business function community taking this ownership on and I attribute the success to the efforts that have been put in by our business functions.”
How Does SAP BTP Help Your Organizations Have the Tools Their Workers Need?
In the same ASUG research on SAP S/4HANA adoption, Szczurek shared that members struggle with insufficient tools or automation in assisting with the transformation. At the same time, 55% of ASUG members are using SAP BTP, a similar rate to those adopting SAP S/4HANA (52%). Szczurek concluded that there’s a growing recognition of SAP BTP’s value in driving innovation, optimizing processes, and maximizing the value of ERP investments, and organizations are now using SAP BTP to help with business transformation.
But “technology is only part of the equation,” she said. Strong internal SAP BTP skills, expertise in SAP S/4HANA, and expertise in system integration continue to emerge as critical factors for successful business transformations.
Southwest Gas found success in using SAP BTP to save time and find efficiency. The enterprise has a department called Safety, Quality, Training, and Qualification, and the team needed help with creating real-time integrations for training requirements, Challa said. With more than 5,000 contractors employed across three states, legacy systems proved challenging. When an operator is qualified and has completed their training, it previously took weeks before they could work. So his team found a solution: a QR code created on SAP Build. Contractors simply use their smartphones to scan a QR code and have all of the information they need, in minutes versus the weeks it previously took to print and ship a qualification card.
SAP BTP provided Challa’s team at Southwest Gas the platform to build this QR code process and have it quickly communicate with SAP SuccessFactors. “I can say proudly this solution is a game changer for us,” Challa said.
At Chevron, the previous ERP implementation included numerous customizations that made upgrades difficult, resulting in technical debt. Kesavulu said her team looked at SAP BTP as a way to keep the core clean, reduce customization, and therefore accelerate innovation.
To strategically govern the company’s use of the platform, her team needed to put guardrails in place so the full technology stack can go through SAP BTP, including Fiori apps, and even outside of the SAP ecosystem to other applications used throughout the enterprise. She identified three priorities of using SAP BTP: automation, extensions, and integrations.
Leon added that Messer also uses the Intelligent Suite, which SAP BTP supports, to have faster integration between SAP and non-SAP applications, as well as non-SAP to non-SAP applications. These applications talk to each other through the suite to have cohesive data and a single source of truth.
How Did You Bring Your Teams Into the Fold and Build Buy-In for Better Data Practices?
Another finding from ASUG research was around change management. ASUG members shared that when new technology is launched at organizations, change management responsibilities are often unclear. The majority of respondents (52%) are relying on implementation partners for change management and less for optimizing or realizing benefits, while also relying on consultants and other subject matter experts for help with implementations, Szczurek highlighted. She concluded that these findings display the need for increased collaboration and communication across teams to view rollouts as an organizationwide effort.
In Challa’s work with Southwest Gas, bringing teams together was the biggest business driver to ensure the digital transformation is most impactful for both the business and its customers. “The technology part is easy to manage, but bringing everyone together is a real journey because everybody’s priority is different,” he said.
Therefore, to create buy-in, he focuses on leveraging technology to improve business outcomes, showing business leaders the purpose of the change management efforts, Challa shared.
Kesavulu shared that at Chevron, buy-in is from multiple business functions, from IT to finance, asset management, materials management, and hydrocarbon value chain. The decision executive is from finance, and business unit leads are from asset management, while IT provides technical enablement, and compliance and shared services enable the program.
What Lesson Do You Wish You Had Known Before You Started This Process?
While the digital transformation journeys at these companies have ultimately been a success, these industry leaders didn’t always get it right — and they learned lessons along the way.
Challa and Leon shared that a big-bang approach is not ideal. Instead, start with the purpose of outcomes to help set the stage, and start with small use cases, then expand to gain buy-in.
“At the end of the day, the change is to the end user in the business,” Kesavulu said. Her team at Chevron conducted focus groups to find change management solutions, but truly understanding the end users’ pain points and bringing them along the journey from the beginning is the ideal way to reach them and find the most success in digital transformation efforts.