Laurel: On that matter of office agility. In 2020, bp started a reorganization that consolidated its procurement departments into that single world procurement group. What have been the challenges that resulted from this reorganization?

Raimundo: Yeah. To provide you a extra context on that. So, if you concentrate on bp being this actually massive world organizations divided in enterprise items, earlier than the organizations, each certainly one of these enterprise items have their very own procurement departments, which deal with actually billions of {dollars} that’s how massive they have been. And in that enterprise, they’ve the ERP programs, 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 duty grow to be throughout a few of these a number of enterprise items, that has your information in all of those enterprise programs.

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 programs, however the taxonomy of the information 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, in order for you a report for a brand new enterprise proprietor, it turns into actually, actually laborious, and likewise the experiences 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 quantity of requests now could be so larger that simply altering and including steps to course of aren’t going to be sufficient. You really want to look into automation to fulfill this increased demand.

Laurel: Properly, talking of automation, it will probably leverage present expertise and construct efficiencies. So, what’s the function of superior applied sciences, like AI, machine studying and superior analytics within the method to your ongoing transformation?

Raimundo: So, at present, all people talks about AI, ML, and all these instruments. However to be trustworthy with you, I believe your journey actually begins a bit bit earlier. I believe after we exit and take into consideration this superior expertise, which clearly, have their place, I believe to start with, what you really want to focus is in your foundational, and that’s your information. So, you ask in regards to the function of the cloud. So, for bp, what we’ve accomplished is all the information used to reside in a number of totally different websites on the market. So, what we’ve accomplished is all the information 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 possibly can create one other column and say, okay, now name it, no matter, United States, or nonetheless you wish to name it.

So, all of this information transformation occurred in a single spot. And what that does can also be enable our customers that want this information to go to a single supply of fact and never be pulling information from a number of programs. An instance of the chaos that that creates is anyone will probably be pulling bill and information from Spence, anyone will pull in PayData. So, then you have already got information discrepancy on the reporting. And having a centralized device the place all people goes for the information reduces a lot complexity on the system.

Laurel: And talking about that type of complexity, it is clear that a number of procurement programs made it troublesome to take care of high quality compliance as nicely, and in addition to manufacturing monitoring in bp provide chain. So, what are a few of the most difficult points of realizing this new imaginative and prescient with a centralized one-stop platform?

Raimundo: Yeah, we’ve a great listing in there. So, let me break it into possibly technical and folks, as a result of I believe folks is one thing that we must always discuss it. So, technical. I believe one of many largest issues in technical is working together with your technical workforce to seek out the proper structure. That is how your imaginative and prescient suits into our structure, which can create much less, as an example, 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 expertise 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 might occur on the screens from the system that we’re utilizing. So, then we determined as a substitute of going to RPA, going to API.