Oil and gas firm accomplishes first phase of global digital transformation

The organization, a major oil and gas company, operates in more than 180 countries around the globe. Over the years, these business units had developed their own processes and run their own instances of finance and procurement systems— generally SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and JD Edwards. In addition, they ran other solutions to manage the supply chain and various assets. 

To improve efficiency and cost effectiveness, management decided to consolidate systems and processes on a single SAP S/4HANA platform and migrate business units to the new platform, country by country. The goal was to standardize processes and reduce their systems footprint in order to manage fewer systems through the company’s shared services support model.

The organization was a long-term customer of both SAP and Microsoft and had built a strong relationship with both vendors. While various partners were engaged, Deloitte was chosen to manage the entire global systems transformation. The company, a Deloitte client for many years, was impressed by our overall understanding of their industry, functional business processes and capabilities—an understanding that also encompassed complex technology work.

Additionally, Deloitte implemented and integrated a DevOps pipeline and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), which made creative use of Microsoft and SAP technologies. This solution automates testing and runs code checks when changes are made— accelerating time to market, user development, and automation. 

Critical to the operation of CFin was Deloitte’s creation of a data work stream, which enables CFin to understand the massive amount of data it receives and how it maps to each country’s system. The team built a change data capture framework to facilitate understanding changes made to data that has been uploaded, because workers in the various geographies are continuing to work in country systems that have not yet been migrated to the central core. 

Once CFin was in place, the Deloitte team began the Digital Core Transformation to migrate business processes from existing systems to S/4HANA and decommissioning old systems, starting with the Canadian business unit for North America.