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Previously, a BIC Magazine article outlined how energy leaders have recently invested, highlighting their increased focus on generating horizontal value by boosting operational performance.
One of the most effective ways leaders are doing this is by applying process intelligence to their operations, connecting previously siloed functions and departments by a common language — process data — so they can reveal new ways to align and take actions to improve liquidity, productivity and revenue.
Let’s look at three ways this is playing out in real life — plant maintenance, accounts payable and order-to-cash — and we’ll also take a deeper dive on plant maintenance as an energy-specific use case.
1. Streamlining plant maintenance
Energy companies are already acutely aware of the need to avoid downtime — particularly unplanned downtime — with the latest estimates suggesting just 3.65 days of unplanned downtime per year (the equivalent of a 1% downtime rate) costs energy businesses more than $5 million dollars.
But improving plant maintenance processes — let alone making the leap to predictive maintenance — is easier said than done. Far from existing in a vacuum, plant maintenance connects to multiple upstream, midstream and downstream processes, all of which tend to operate in their own siloes.
For this reason, one of the first challenges energy companies encounter when trying to improve plant maintenance is simply gaining visibility into it. This leaves them unable to answer key questions that could help drive improvements such as how their maintenance operations are affecting production uptime, how delays in material procurement and logistics are affecting their plant-maintenance schedules and what the root causes of maintenance delays are.
However, thanks to new innovations, gaining process visibility is no longer an insurmountable challenge. In fact, unlike process mapping or other traditional process-improvement initiatives, a process-intelligence platform can provide both much-needed visibility into all core business processes, as well as the answers to those key questions — rapidly, and without the need for manual intervention.
By automatically pulling data from source systems (Maximo, SAP, and beyond) a process-intelligence platform creates a ‘live’ process digital twin, augmented by process knowledge and machine learning, to enable continuous, cross-functional tracking and improvement through one system.
For example, suppose you want to get to the bottom of why your scheduled adherence rate is low. A process-intelligence platform will dive deep into all the variables that affect your rate, including mapping out the real-time flows between initial notifications, work orders, material reservations and purchase orders, revealing everything that happens along the way and flagging issues — plus next-best-action recommendations — automatically.
In the case of our example, suppose it reveals that one of the top inefficiencies bringing down your adherence rate is material delays. This is a valuable insight alone, but the platform dives deeper, revealing that your cooling towers and heat exchangers have the most work orders attached to them by far. In tandem, it reveals process-related causes of delays, such as when your supplier was actually to blame due to delaying deliveries after you procured materials. Or when procurement took too long to create a purchase requisition, and so on.
Armed with this level of insight, at scale, plus AI-enabled action recommendations, a process-intelligence platform gives you all the tools at your disposal to streamline your plant-maintenance processes, and generate lasting, measurable value.
To learn more about how you can improve plant maintenance with process intelligence, watch Chevron’s process-intelligence story, in conversation with Celonis.
2. Catching duplicate invoices in accounts payable
Paying invoices twice is a costly and avoidable business problem, but against today’s backdrop of volatile geopolitical and macroeconomic events, it can quickly add up to disaster.
With a process-intelligence platform, AP teams are tapping into their invoice-management modules (for example, in SAP), to identify duplicate invoices that would otherwise go undiscovered until a later audit.
It works like this, the platform groups invoices together that are suspected to be duplicates based on different patterns. Users can then review the identified potential duplicates with the help of a machine learning-based confidence score, provide feedback and take action accordingly, ultimately preventing unnecessary payments and invoice processing. The app also provides the possibility to automate the blocking of duplicates.
This includes both exact invoices — which have matching invoice numbers, amounts, dates and vendors — as well as approximate duplicate invoices that may have been submitted twice, entered with an old due date or had a price update.
To learn more about how you can catch duplicate invoices and sharpen other key finance processes, watch this webinar on how bp reimagined its AP model with process intelligence.
3. Reducing invoicing lead times in order-to-cash
Every additional day that creeps into an energy company’s invoicing lead time can rack up millions or even tens of millions of dollars in monthly cash-flow impact. And when you’re an organization with multiple sales divisions, a complex supply chain and a diverse product range, identifying the causes of bottlenecks — let alone fixing them — can seem near-impossible.
That’s usually due to a lack of visibility into end-to-end processes, which in turn leaves you with no clear view of your ability to standardize processes, weed out deviations and track high-priority KPIs like ticketing lead times, invoicing lead times or customer cancellation invoices.
With a process-intelligence platform, every team that touches order-to-cash can see the same end-to-end picture and can work towards the same goals. Performance dashboards can be tailored to visualize key processes and measure activity in real time.
See how Neste, the world’s largest producer of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, took the steps outlined above to cut its average invoice lead time in half and create an estimated monthly cash flow impact of €55 million euros.
For more information, visit celonis.com.
