Insights into the Energy Industry: EPM for Oil & Gas

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. 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. Connected planning is revolutionising the FP&A functions within the industry and resulting in significant advantage to those who adopt early and implement effectively.

The Planning Imperative

Given the complexity of the oil and gas industry and inherent market uncertainty, there are significant risks to financial performance. Effective financial planning and analysis are critical for energy companies to draw insights and produce meaningful forecasts taking into account both internal and industry-wide dynamics.

As a leading consultancy in the EPM space, Bolt Consulting implements comprehensive and strategic solutions for 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.

Responding to Market Dynamics

With information available at everyone's fingertips, being able to respond quickly to opportunities is critical in maximising return. With integrated planning systems, it's easier than ever before to provide full automation solutions to remove the time burden of manually updating data or running scenarios.

With the ability to quickly create scenarios within planning models, you can be informed on a range of options before making decisions. This agility proves essential in an industry where commodity prices can shift dramatically based on geopolitical events, weather patterns, or policy changes.

Energy companies must model multiple scenarios simultaneously: different oil price trajectories, varying demand patterns, regulatory changes, and capital allocation options. Manual approaches simply cannot keep pace with the speed at which conditions change.

Platform Capabilities

Anaplan is a leader in providing high-quality EPM cloud platforms, helping businesses of all sizes improve decision-making, optimise operations, and achieve business goals. It's a powerful tool that can be tailored and built to suit company structure, solving problems like financial planning and budgeting, sales and operational planning, supply chain planning, workforce planning, risk management, and compliance reporting.

It's a flexible platform that can be customised to specific needs while being scalable to allow for business growth. Some of the world's leading energy companies have trusted Anaplan for their planning needs and are adding value with its comprehensive toolset.

Pigment is a cloud-based planning and budgeting platform 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, covering all the same use cases with a modern interface that reduces training requirements.

Data Integration and Single Source of Truth

By combining feeds of data from various systems into a centralised repository, we can consolidate information to provide the business with a single source of truth. By utilising tools such as data hubs, integrations, and other master data techniques, you bring all your systems into one.

Systems like Anaplan or Pigment have 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, manual processes become a thing of the past.

Some tasks, such as changing a business hierarchy, can cause significant manual work across all systems and spreadsheets in use. 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.

Collaboration Across the Enterprise

EPM software helps teams of finance professionals, operational analysts, and geographically dispersed stakeholders collaborate effectively. In energy companies with operations spanning multiple continents, this capability proves essential.

Real-time visibility into the same data ensures everyone works from consistent information. Field operations, corporate finance, and executive leadership can all access the insights they need without waiting for manual report distribution.

The Energy Transition

Beyond traditional oil and gas operations, the energy transition creates new planning complexity. Companies diversifying into renewables, exploring carbon capture, or developing hydrogen capabilities need planning systems that can model these emerging business lines alongside legacy operations.

Modern EPM platforms accommodate this complexity, enabling integrated planning across traditional and emerging energy sources. This capability supports the strategic decisions that will shape company trajectories over coming decades.

Getting Started

If you're in the energy business and want to find out whether an EPM solution could work for you, the first step is understanding your current state and future requirements. An assessment of existing planning processes, data quality, and system landscape provides the foundation for informed decision-making.

The investment in proper planning technology typically pays for itself through improved decision-making, reduced manual effort, and enhanced ability to respond to market dynamics. In a volatile industry where margins matter, these advantages compound over time.