Hydrocarbon Processing - February 2022 - 33

Special Focus Digital Technologies
A. ANDRADE, Accenture, Houston, Texas,
S. LAUZON, SAP, Houston, Texas,
Why robotic process automation is quickly
becoming a must for downstream companies
For the refining operation that wants to relieve its planning
team of mind-numbing manual data-management tasks, there
are bots for that. For the fuel distributor that wants to complete
scheduling tasks with greater speed and precision and with
minimal human involvement, there are bots for that and many
other tasks, too.
Bots are quickly becoming fixtures across the energy landscape
as more producers, refiners, distributors and other participants
in the hydrocarbon supply chain turn to a technology
known as robotic process automation (RPA) as an important
step toward becoming an intelligent, data-informed enterprise
with the side benefit of unlocking additional value through increased
efficiency, productivity, reliability and predictability. Already
widely used in industries like banking, finance, insurance
and even utilities to help companies boost efficiency through
automation and manage vast volumes of data from disparate
sources, RPA is gaining a stronger foothold in the oil and gas
business, which has a long history of process automation. According
to the author's company, 40% of oil and gas companies
pursuing efficiency improvements utilize increasingly digital
technologies like RPA as part of their transformation initiatives.
To power that transformation, downstream energy companies
are using RPA in tandem with technologies like the Internet of
Things, predictive analytics, machine-learning and artificial intelligence-the
building blocks of an intelligent enterprise.
As one of those building blocks, RPA can help energy companies
capture new efficiencies and improve productivity across
their operations and supply chains simply by automating tedious,
time-consuming and often error-prone manual processes. These
automation capabilities are critical to improving resilience and
maintaining margins during volatile oil and gas market cycles.
Integrating RPA into an energy business does not mean replacing
human beings with actual robots. It is about using intelligent
software to perform repetitive tasks, freeing people
for pursuits that add value to the business. Guided by a set of
user-defined rules, RPA uses programmable, machine-learningdriven
bots to automate tasks. Some bots need prompting and
interaction with a human user ( " attended " bots) to perform a
programmed task. " Unattended " bots are trained to work autonomously
without human input. Today's generation of bots
actually " watch " users perform processes, intuit the logic behind
them and determine how to do the same tasks themselves.
RPA interacts with individual computer systems the same way
a human user would, with no complex integration or coding required.
Moreover, energy companies can access RPA as a cloudbased
service without an expensive capital outlay.
The ease with which RPA can automate certain key business
functions makes it invaluable to a downstream energy company,
particularly in the areas of planning and scheduling, where
a large percentage of the data inputs (typically 60%-80%) tend
to require time-consuming and error-prone manual intervention
and processing in a variety of formats: Excel, PDF, email,
etc. As more downstream energy companies are discovering,
RPA can save significant amounts of labor and reduce costly accounting,
planning and scheduling errors, all of which benefit
the bottom line. The myriad tasks that RPA bots can perform
for an energy company include:
* Trading confirmation processing
* Trading settlement and invoicing
* Upload of general ledger entries
* Upload of supplier invoices
* Payables scanning, matching and processing
* Order confirmation
* Production order operation confirmation
* Supplier invoice status checks.
It is no wonder bots are becoming so popular. Two examples
of how energy companies are putting them to work in a downstream
setting are discussed here.
To streamline lead-to-cash. In a volatile price environment
companies must have the ability to quickly lock in prices and
promptly collect payment. RPA can streamline the lead-to-cash
process, using bots to correct missing master data to transact deals
without disruption. Meanwhile, financial-related bots can automate
certain time-consuming processes, such as invoice status
FIG. 1. Developing capability along intelligent automation spectrum
Hydrocarbon Processing | FEBRUARY 2022 33
Hydrocarbon Processing - February 2022

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