Planning is more critical than ever in the energy sector.
We take a look at why utilising EPM tools within the energy industry can help business create new revenue streams, optimise current ones, and add more value to their portfolios than ever before.
Introduction
Given the complexity of the oil and gas industry and the inherent market uncertainty, there are significant risks to financial performance. As such, effective financial planning and analysis are critical for oil and gas companies to draw insights from and produce meaningful forecasts taking into account both internal and industry-wide dynamics.
Shift in the Energy Landscape
The energy industry is experiencing challenges like never before. From dwindling stocks, global risks to the transportation of physical supplies, increased volatility in the financial markets; it’s never been as challenging to be profitable in the energy industry, and with fundamental shifts in environmental strategy, it’s crucial to plan for the future.
Whether you’re an upstream, midstream or downstream company there are several factors that could lead to challenges.
Key factors include…
Market Volatility
Increased market volatility is often driven by supply and demand, geopolitical events and market dynamics.
Geological Risk
Risks associated with unforeseen issues in subsurface geology and reservoir complexities.
Logistics & Supply Chain
Disruptions in the supply chain such as severe weather, port congestion and route blockages can cause shipping delays.
Freight Rates
Increased fuel costs and lower vessel availability often affect shipping costs, thereby eating into profits.
Geopolitics
Events in the wider geopolitical space and trade policies can greatly influence projects.
These factors pose significant challenges to the day to day operations but also to finance. FP&A is important for several reasons.
Understanding how the business will perform can serve as a guide to making key decisions and allocation of resource.
Analysis can also show periods of likely cash shortages. Examples may include delays in construction of refineries at the same time as periods of high inflation.
Sufficient cash availability and usage modelling can highlight such liquidity risks and help the business plan short term loans in advance and avoid last minute borrowing at punitive rates.
In today’s business environment there are large amounts of data to process and understand. It is becoming more apparent that traditional methods involving disjoined systems, countless spreadsheets and clunky data loads are posing significant challenges to FP&A functions. Such a fragmented approach can often lead to discrepancies, difficulties in consolidation and lack of real-time visibility of financial performance.
This often leaves CFOs and finance managers spending more time ‘fixing the system’ and less time making business improvement decisions.
Energising the Sector
Connected planning is revolutionising the FP&A functions within the industry and resulting in a significant advantage to those who adopt early and implement effectively. As a leading consultancy in the EPM space, Bolt Consulting Group are able to implement comprehensive and strategic solutions to organisations that need to optimise financial planning, budgeting and forecasting. We have the experience and knowledge to initiate meaningful discussions and generate buy-in within your organisation.
So how would planning software like Anaplan or Pigment help solve these issues & help energy companies?
Let’s take a look at some of the system challenges faced by energy companies…
Complex calculations can be time consuming.
With many different variables to consider, and a constantly changing political backdrop, firms can save time by bringing their planning process into a solution like Anaplan, when compared with conventional spreadsheets.
Track Finance & Operations.
A robust planning system like Anaplan or Pigment can take care of both quantitive data and qualitative data, meaning you can track both financial and operational KPIs in one place.
Shifting Priorities
With the shift toward renewables and other forms of energy, having the ability to scenario plan against new strategies within tools like Anaplan and Pigment mean making the right decisions for the future.
Should oil & gas companies consider investing in a planning solution like Anaplan or Pigment?
Centralising Data
By combining feeds of data from various systems into a centralized repository, we can consolidate it to provide the business with a single source of truth.
By utilising tools such as Data Hubs, integrations and other master data techniques you can bring all your systems into one creating a single source of truth.
Automating repetitive tasks
Systems like Anaplan or Pigment have a great ability to automate regular tasks, such as data flows, data cleansing, calculations, and updating of reporting suites.
With built in integrations that can run on schedule, means manual processes are a thing of the past.
Synchronising Changes
Some tasks, such as changing a business hierarchy, can cause a lot of manual work across all the systems and spreadsheets that are used.
A single change to the hierarchy in Anaplan or Pigment can adjust the entire model and reporting in an instant. This saves time and eliminates the possibility of errors.
Enhanced Collaboration
EPM software like Anaplan or Pigment can help teams of finance professionals, operational analysts, and geographically dispersed staff come together and work together effectively.
These tools are cloud-based and allow for selective security rules and access. They also allow staff in a remote production facility to communicate their finances to central finance staff in real time.
Save time with insightful analysis
The true value of these systems is that they free up time for team members to actually analyze and provide insights from the output.
By automating and streamlining tasks that can take many days and condensing them into automated workflows, we can free up time and resources for more value-added activities.
Tried & tested at thousands of companies
Even though the EPM space is moving quickly, and new technologies are coming out almost day by day, these two are proven in the marketplace and have track record of adding value for some of the largest businesses around the world. Take a look at just some of the companies that have managed to use these systems to their advantage over on our about page.
Implementing EPM isn’t cheap – but it pays for itself!
Implementing Anaplan or Pigment does come with costs, such as licenses from the vendor, and having a trusted partner to implement the technical aspects of the system correctly. Getting it wrong can be time-consuming and costly, which is why it’s worth talking to professionals with many years of experience implementing these systems, such as Bolt Consulting.
However, when it’s done right, having a system like Anaplan or Pigment will help lead to increased revenues, quicker go-to-market, more profitable promotional activity, lower costs, and higher business valuations. Many companies looking at investment or IPO will find that having a proper system in place is a prerequisite.
Anaplan has been proven at over 1,700+ clients around the world.
Some of the worlds leading companies have trusted Anaplan for their planning needs and are adding value with it’s fantastic toolset.
Key Overview
Pigment is shaping the future.
Pigment is a cloud-based planning and budgeting platform that is paving the way in AI technology to enhance analysis and user interaction.
It’s a user-friendly platform that can be used by anyone within the business, and covers all of the same use cases.
Pigment is revolutionising the planning space by utilising new AI technology to speed up the process and make interrogating data faster than ever before.
Pigment is rapidly growing with over 100+ clients around the world.
As a platform Pigment is rapidly evolving and they’re investing a lot of time and money into expanding functionality.
Key Overview
About Bolt Consulting
Bolt Consulting is a financial systems specialist that can help whether you need to implement general ledger systems, ERP such as SAP or Oracle, or EPM planning software like Anaplan or Pigment.
We’re run by ex-Big4 qualified accountants with the highest certifications available within each system, meaning we won’t let you down.
We can help.
Both platforms come as a shell out of the box, but Bolt Consulting has a library of accelerators that help speed up implementation, reduce implementation costs, and get these systems up and running quicker than most.
Solution Advisory
As an impartial implementation partner to a number of platforms, we’re able to advise which system suits your business best. We don’t guide you in any specific direction till we’ve understood your needs.
Technical Implementation
As certified and experienced implementation experts, we can help with full end-to-end delivery toward a successful implementation. We have a large team of consultants based around the world meaning time zone isn’t an issue.
Managed Services & Support
The real work starts once you’ve implemented a system, and we’re here for the long term. We never abandon any project once go-live has happened, so you always have our team of experts on hand to support. So whether you need help for tweaking the system or a full-on managed services approach, we’ve got you covered.
Who we’ve helped.
… Just a selection of clients and companies who’ve benefited from the power of what we can do. Want your company to be featured here too? Get in touch.
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