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6 Steps to Business Transformation in Oil & Gas

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Price volatility, soaring costs and increasing regulations: the need for – and the value of – operational excellence – has never been greater in the Oil & Gas industry.

Fast changing markets have created a ‘transform or lose pace’ approach to today’s business management. But what shape should that business transformation take?

While some organizations see it as all-out turnaround effort, others believe that transformation is a continuous process of aligning a business model to support strategy. Others still embark on tactical improvements limited to specific functions or processes and then scale up fast.

The key is that action has to be taken. With that in mind, here are six steps to ensuring a successful business transformation?

1. Start Small, Think Big, Scale Fast

A rapid and successful first business process automation project is critical to your long-term success. Choosing a ‘quick win’ will energize your initiative, while hand-picking the Right First Process to be automated will de-risk your BPM initiative and align with business goals.

 

2. Let the Business Drive

Utilizing collaborative workflow software will play a key part in joining the dots between business and IT and ensure everyone can play a part in defining what success looks like. Simple, uncluttered and visual tools are key to ensuring business ownership of process initiatives and creating a Center of Excellence.

 

3. Get your foundation right

Reuse and ease of integration promotes faster and cost-effective process deployment as you scale. A layered BPM architecture provides the flexible yet highly robust BPM framework needed to support enterprise-wide BPM initiatives. Ensure that the data modeling approach minimizes process complexity and enables a consistent way to synchronize process models with source data and legacy applications.

 

4. Think agile

Too many BPM initiatives fail because of rigid and outdated implementation schedules. Swapping traditional implementation stages (analysis, design, test) for agile implementation methods ensure that mission-critical processes can be delivered in weeks rather than months. Which brings us to…

 

5. Don’t strive for perfection

Regular release schedules set within a proven framework will create a healthy development environment where value can be realised quickly and iterative business process improvement is the main goal.

 

6. Check the vendor’s track record

Business transformation is by its nature long-term and iterative. Many BPM vendors can show you evidence of fast ROI gained in two-three projects but it is those with many 100s and 1000s of processes automated that will deliver success in the long run.