Process automation in oil and gas: seizing the growth potential

Host00:02

Our next speaker is Paul Stone, product strategist at FlowForma. FlowForma is our title sponsor, and we thank them for their support. Paul uses his in-depth oil and gas sector experience to support FlowForma's clients in achieving serious savings and competitive advantage. He is committed to empowering citizen developers to rapidly digitize their processes and manage them smarter and faster, without using any code. Paul will share his insights on process automation in oil and gas: seizing the growth potential in 2023. Over to you, Paul.

Paul Stone00:33

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here, and hopefully by the end of this presentation you'll be aware of all the benefits you can get from process automation.

Paul Stone01:03

Let me first give you a brief introduction to FlowForma, the company and the product. We're an award-winning business process automation tool that focuses on automating business processes where people work together to achieve a business goal. We have over 200,000 users across the globe, in many industries including oil and gas, primarily in the EU but also in the US and Asia Pacific.

Paul Stone01:42

We deliver a three-in-one tool. It captures data as you execute processes, handles the communications around them, and generates and manages documents, emails and so on, so each process moves along as quickly as possible. We're cloud-based, we operate inside Microsoft 365, and we integrate strongly with third-party systems, including systems running on premises and in other cloud environments.

Paul Stone02:30

We empower oil, gas and energy companies to transform digitally with an intelligent business process automation tool. You digitize your own business processes using a no-code configuration approach, so the people who carry out those processes day to day can digitize them.

Paul Stone02:54

All it takes is a person who knows the business process. Without any IT knowledge, they can configure a solution that runs that process repeatably, in a standardized way, every day, generating significant productivity gains.

Paul Stone03:18

It helps with a whole variety of processes and scenarios: cost reduction, overcoming skills shortages by increasing the productivity of existing resources, transforming your business models, and interacting with your customers and suppliers.

Paul Stone03:42

There's a lot to say about the state of the oil and gas industry today, but I'll focus on one or two areas. One is the labor and skills shortage. A recent EY report on reshaping for a future that may not be tomorrow's reality shows that over 90% of companies are automating, or planning to automate, work practices to address labor shortages.

Paul Stone04:29

It's a big challenge, because how do you recruit people into roles when there simply aren't enough skills available in the marketplace? One answer is to focus on productivity: make better use of the resources you already have, so they can carry out more work. Process automation helps processes run more efficiently and frees up time for other tasks.

Paul Stone05:25

So how can digitization help alleviate the skills shortage? First, it can reduce hiring delays by automating onboarding. Almost every company we speak to has a weakness in the way it onboards new employees. Even companies with comprehensive HR management systems have rarely automated onboarding.

Paul Stone05:56

Part of the reason is that every company's onboarding process is slightly different, so there isn't a standard solution. That's an opportunity for a flexible process automation solution like FlowForma: run onboarding your way, but with the efficiency and productivity improvements of a digital process.

Paul Stone06:45

When you automate, the system drives the process along. It prompts people to complete tasks and monitors their completion, so you can see where things are at any point in time. If a process is stuck in a bottleneck, you can see in real time who has the ball, and remind them to progress it.

Paul Stone07:40

You can also improve the potential of existing staff. One way to address the skills shortage is to retain the people you already have, and technology helps. It increases staff morale, and you can use the same tool to give staff a portal where they can submit feedback on their work and conditions, so you can monitor their happiness and help retention.

Paul Stone08:40

Over the past couple of years, the oil and gas market has been very volatile. External events are having a significant impact on profitability, resourcing requirements and growth. On the positive side, that's leading to lots of opportunities to grow and invest. What you want is to level out the impact on your organization, so you're on a steady growth plan rather than the rollercoaster these events create.

Paul Stone09:48

One way to do that is to introduce digital processes. They standardize your operations, and standardization improves the predictability of outcomes: how successful a process will be, how long it will take, and when resources will be free for the next project.

Paul Stone10:28

You can also implement controls to contain operational risk. If operations are done in a standardized way, you can make sure people don't break away from the standard process, and monitor processes in real time to spot anomalies, tasks that take too long, or processes that break off. A key success factor for those controls is adoption.

Paul Stone11:31

Digital processes also bring flexibility, because you can change them very easily as conditions change. And they let you record work anywhere; you might be on a site and record a step on your mobile device.

Paul Stone12:03

A big concern with no-code tools like FlowForma, where the business defines its own processes, is governance. A lot of IT managers we speak to worry about shadow IT. You're giving people tools to become self-sufficient and improve their processes, but you also want guardrails and governance, so they don't break processes or overuse resources.

Paul Stone12:47

You do that with a governance application. A gatekeeper, typically in IT, controls the production environments and gives people sandboxes where they can be creative and digitize processes themselves. When they want to go to production, they go through a gate, and IT decides whether it's ready for the big time.

Paul Stone13:26

There are a lot of topical technologies out there, but any organization can only invest in certain tools, and each gives a certain return on investment. Robotic process automation is fantastic for high-volume transaction processing where the transactions are predictable, but it has a limited scope. IoT is valuable for certain things, but again the scope is limited.

Paul Stone14:33

Process automation can span all of these teams and drive real benefits across the organization. It's easy to implement and has wide-scaling benefits, so we consider it the fastest route to digitalization and the fastest route to return on investment.

Paul Stone15:07

What does that look like as a system? It combines three things: workflow, where people execute tasks together to achieve a business goal; document generation and communication management, so communications between the people involved are automatic; and forms for collecting the data relevant to each task.

Paul Stone15:40

What people often don't know is that processes can be digitized in weeks. We'll talk about a use case shortly where processes that took years to develop were digitized in a matter of weeks. You can start seeing ROI within six weeks of getting started. It works across departments and divisions, and it supports mobile, since everyone accesses processes on a tablet or phone these days.

Paul Stone16:34

When you implement it, you're improving the quality of the data relevant to each process and your visibility across the organization of where processes are at any point in time.

Paul Stone16:43

People often ask what this looks like. We don't have time for a full demonstration today, so here are some sample screenshots. Across the top is a series of boxes representing the steps in a process, the tasks done by people. Below is a digital form capturing the data relevant to that task; here, a table of information including photographs.

Paul Stone17:37

As you move through the steps, the data being collected changes, because it's relevant to the job you're doing right now. Whether you're on the desktop or a mobile device, you see the same view, and every process has the same interface. That really helps adoption, so people quickly learn new processes.

Paul Stone18:09

And that supports digitization at scale, which is the real goal. A single process is all very well, but to make significant gains you need to think about digitizing two, three, fifty or a hundred processes.

Paul Stone18:25

What areas can process automation help with? We have clients who use FlowForma to manage fleets of vehicles, from onboarding new vehicles and assets into the field to their ongoing maintenance.

Paul Stone18:58

The system also reaches out to external people. Your suppliers, contractors, supply chain partners and clients can complete steps in a process just like anyone inside your organization, which smooths the interactions between everyone involved.

Paul Stone19:36

One small example used very often in oil and gas is management of change. It's quick and easy to get going, because it's a basic process, but it lets you put controls in place so that every change is handled in a compliant way.

Paul Stone19:58

One of our most popular processes across all industries is incident management, because it needs to be done at the time and place where the incident occurred. Mobile lets you capture a lot of detail on the incident, then process it through a workflow and assign corrective and preventive actions so it doesn't happen again.

Paul Stone20:23

A digital process automation system inherently gives you a full audit trail: who did every task, when it started and was completed, and what happened along the way. That really helps with regulatory compliance, because you can show that every process was executed correctly, to corporate standards, in a given time frame.

Paul Stone21:04

We do a lot of purchase requisitions and capital expenditure approvals, because you can build in business rules so a requisition always goes through the right channels, with different levels of approval based on its size. We work with upstream and downstream processes alike; you design the processes you need for your environment.

Paul Stone21:55

Another very frequent use case is preventive maintenance tracking, running scheduled checks on assets. We have companies who use it for meter validation, to make sure all their metering equipment complies with standards and performs as expected.

Paul Stone22:25

To sum up those use cases: the system monitors progress and performance across teams automatically, so you can see where every process is, what has happened in the past and what's likely to happen next, gathering an audit trail as you go.

Paul Stone23:01

It lets you be agile, because your own people build the processes, and they can tweak them quickly, test them with the people using them and make sure they're adopted. It supports self-regulation: we can provide template processes, but the processes you build follow your best practice and make sure it's executed every time, which makes the whole organization run more predictably and more resiliently.

Paul Stone24:13

All the data entered in a process is gathered centrally, along with past performance metrics. Unlike data from IoT devices, which has to be churned and interpreted, the data FlowForma captures is directly relevant to your business goals, so it's high-value data, all available in real-time reporting.

Paul Stone25:13

By default, the information captured in FlowForma is visible to everyone in the process, but you can restrict that, and there are always two levels of security to get through, so information isn't inadvertently passed on to someone else.

Paul Stone25:44

Digital processes also improve the quality of your work, and that improves your relationship with your customers. Many of our clients have seen a significant drop in customer complaints after taking control of customer-facing processes with FlowForma. And driving processes this way increases efficiency, making the best use of your resources at a time when they're so constrained.

Paul Stone26:57

Now one of our case studies: Dresser Natural Gas Solutions, a leading provider of measurement, piping and instrumentation solutions, based in Texas. Their challenge was migrating legacy document processes that were key to the company's engineering operations. As far as I remember, they had become an independent company, and they decided to review all their processes and digitize as many as possible in a very short time frame.

Paul Stone27:31

Processes they digitized included engineering documentation approval, explosion submission forms, change management, equipment and software requests, and customer complaints. The very first process was digitized inside 30 days, from starting from scratch to deploying it and having people use it.

Paul Stone28:03

That was a real game changer. Previously, digitizing a process took so long and was so painful that they didn't want to think about change at all. Now they could get something live from scratch within 30 days and tweak it to make sure it was adopted. Once the first few processes were delivered, the snowball started rolling, and they digitized more and more processes at scale.

Paul Stone28:35

Every one of those processes was monitored and tracked by the system, so they could identify the savings from each one directly. For example, they saved a significant share of the document controller's time, because all the documents were now managed by business processes, freeing her up for other work. They measured cost savings and efficiency the same way.

Paul Stone29:13

They could also continuously improve their workflows, which they hadn't been able to do before, because building a workflow with traditional tools took so long that changing it was very difficult. With the no-code tool, change was easy. And by gathering all that data, they could make better decisions; analytics is so important now, and you need the data to carry it out.

Paul Stone30:03

At this point, let's take some questions. The first one says: this sounds a lot like shadow IT, so how do you control it?

Paul Stone30:32

In some respects, you're absolutely right: you're getting business people to build out the systems. But FlowForma lets you apply controls so you don't adversely impact production environments. The training cycle is about two days, and after that people can start building their digital processes. Once they've worked with the end users and are happy the processes are tested and will be adopted, they request promotion to production. That request goes through IT, who carry out due diligence and then easily promote the processes into production.

Paul Stone31:34

The next question is: how do you get started? First, deploying FlowForma is very easy. It installs inside Microsoft 365 from the store, in a contained environment. It stores all its information in SharePoint Online, so the task details, data and documents from your processes are stored securely there. You access FlowForma with your Microsoft 365 or SharePoint login, and all the data stays inside your Microsoft 365 environment. It can also store information in a SQL database for reporting, if you need that.

Paul Stone32:53

Once you've installed it, we give you a support service to get started, called SureStart, included with your license. We hand-hold you through building your first process; all you need is some understanding of the process and some documentation. After that, you have the skills to maintain it and build new processes yourself. Our mantra is helping you help yourself, but we also provide services should you want us to build processes for you.

Paul Stone34:01

The next question: can you integrate with any system? FlowForma supports integration through a variety of mechanisms. Many clients use a SQL database as a staging area, for example for master data coming from SAP and other systems, so there's a consistent set of data across them. We also integrate using REST and SOAP APIs, with a no-code interface, and through Microsoft Logic Apps, which connect to more than 500 cloud applications and on-premises systems via the Microsoft gateway. Lots of companies, particularly in the energy sector, integrate FlowForma with on-premises back ends.

Paul Stone35:40

Another question: how do you prioritize processes? When you're starting off, choose a process that doesn't require integration, because it's really quick to digitize. Then look for a process used by a large number of people rather than a small user group, because it will have a higher impact.

Paul Stone36:50

What's really successful is digitizing the first process as quickly as possible and showing benefits quickly, because that impresses people. Get it up and running, seek feedback on what people like and don't like, and use that positive impact as momentum to digitize the next one, and the next, and roll it out more widely.

Paul Stone37:55

I've also been asked whether SharePoint Online is mandatory. Yes, we currently require Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online. It's used as a database and for authentication. The upside is that you're building on a system you already have and have already approved, including Azure Active Directory in the background, and it stores a large array of different types of content that FlowForma works with.

Paul Stone38:54

FlowForma is also constantly under development. We launched in 2016, and since then we've issued quarterly releases with new features. We listen very closely to our customers, and we consider every new feature request and release it in a quarterly release if it's of general value. That's quite different from the way many IT vendors work. And with that, I think we're out of questions.

Host40:02

Paul, thank you so much for such insightful information, and for answering all the questions. I suggest the audience connect directly with the speakers through one-to-one meetings, and visit our title sponsor's booth to see their collateral. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Stone40:33

That's great, thank you very much.