Statista forecasts the global process automation market will grow to more than USD $13 billion by 2030, an increase of more than $12 billion compared to 2020. Most enterprises see automation technology as a top priority for successful digital transformation and for creating business competitiveness in the global market.

While this trend is increasing globally, the market adoption in Thailand presents a great opportunity for over 7,000 Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) and enterprises as the market’s competition propels them to adopt intelligent automation (IA).

Some of the common challenges include high initial investment and recurring operating costs, a longer implementation timeframe, and ensuring payback justification. Given the talent crunch, specialized IT resources and infrastructure needs are intensifying these complexities.

What Technology Can Automate the Oil and Gas Industry?

The Oil and Gas (O&G) industry has long dealt with market volatility and price downturns. In the quest to discover what lies beyond, the sector must cope with large volumes of data by leveraging technologies such as IA, which combines robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes and streamline workflows.

The ever-evolving technology landscape and post-pandemic-led disruptions have intensified the pressure on the O&G and energy industries to introduce automation and embark on a digital transformation journey at all levels of the operational cycle.

What Is Automation in Oil and Gas?

Oil and gas automation, or oilfield automation, refers to processes involving digital technologies that can help energy producers achieve better workflow efficiency, from production to supply chain. IA deploys intelligent digital workers to fill in skills gaps by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks faster and with 100% accuracy.

Listen to this podcast episode to learn more about why digital workers are essential to oil and gas.

While the O&G industry may not be the fastest adapting industry to technology changes, there are still efforts to push towards a transformative future. In this instance, PTT Digital, who is one of our key partners in Thailand, has been a Managed Service Provider* with SS&C Blue Prism since May last year and has also recently achieved their Silver Delivery Certification status as an SS&C Blue Prism certified partner.

*A Managed Service Provider acts as an enabler for SMBs and enterprises to drive the adoption of intelligent process automation for cost efficiency in their business operations while maintaining competitiveness in the market at speed. The pay-per-use solution allows flexibility, and scalability and provides secured access control.

What Is the Use Case for Automation in Oil and Gas?

PTT Digital demonstrated their capability as a delivery partner when they deployed SS&C Blue Prism solutions in PTT Group’s O&G business unit (BU) across finance and accounting, procurement and O&G BU. They deployed digital workers to assist with bank reconciliation, dividend processing, and receipt validation, as well end-to-end e-excise tax submissions.

In the case of the O&G BU, it’s imperative to ensure tax reports are accurately submitted to the excise system. Otherwise, they incur hefty penalty costs. This increases as the cost of goods could easily range from one hundred million baht to one thousand million baht. There’s no room for errors. Taking into consideration the oil fund tax, their return on investment (ROI) is justified if payment of the oil fund tax is made in a timely manner and the employees are more productive.

Furthermore, to improve the turnaround time across multiple business units, they adopted the SS&C Blue Prism development methodology throughout the project with a Center of Excellence (CoE) model support. The process discovery has demonstrated an ROI of 1.18 with a total FTE savings of 3.43x. The development team also achieved ADM01 & APD01 and ASD 01 certifications as a result.

After its go-live, the users and CoE team continued to work closely and engaged in monthly meetings to identify performance and log issues for improvements. When the hyper-care phase was completed, there was a total of 94% FTE reductions, and this resulted in an extremely high customer satisfaction score.

As a Phase 2 of the Gas Generation Plant (GSP) Excise, additional processes were automated in a span of three months. PTT Digital reduced costs by 50% and saved time to market for their businesses.

Other use cases for automation in oil, gas, and energy

IA isn’t limited to one use case. It has the potential to completely transform entire industries and how work is done. Read more to find out how:

• An energy and utilities company used automation to deliver a customer-centric, hybrid organization.
• An oil and gas company used IA and RPA to gain a competitive advantage.

What Are the Benefits of Automation in the Oil and Gas Industry?

IA carries a lot of potential for oil and gas companies looking to increase their ROI, achieve better sustainability, and improve their operations. Using the example of PTT Digital, what are the business benefits of oil and gas automation?

1. With access to accurate, real-time data, employees’ satisfaction scaled by 100%, and they didn’t have to deal with erroneous reporting that might incur high penalties if done incorrectly.
2. Timesaving from the timeframe of 8 to 3 months helped the company because they’re now able to fund payments back to the company.
3. With the tangible savings, the company plans to standardize its utilization of digital workers for all seven of its plants.
4. IA reduces manual work in creating excise templates, uploading excise data, verifying volume and amount, checking the responsibility of their personnel, etc. It also eliminates physical documentation registrations and aids in kickstarting earlier workflow approvals.
5. Cycle time leads to earlier data availability for data-driven business decision-making.
6. With process automation, the quality and efficiency of tax improved tremendously through streamlining, standardizing, and optimizing the processes with high accuracy – also allowing for 24/7 operations.