- Fastest growing priority for energy executives: managing investment data end-to-end
- Top-line growth can no longer be enabled by proportional headcount; data is a key enabler of operational efficiencies
- Key to strategic real-time decision-making is centralized economic & technical silos across the investment lifecycle
Higher Expectations, Increasing Competition, Lower Margins – How Are You Mitigating?
There is no denying the trend that investors in the energy market are fast becoming more sophisticated with higher expectations for data and information management. This against a backdrop of increasing competition, decreasing margins, and continued expectations of profitable risk-adjusted growth. According to Mercatus’ latest 2018 Advanced Global Energy Insights Report, many energy companies are facing these trends head on through diversification, globalization, and better management and usage data to drive better decisions and mitigate risks.
Fastest Growing Executive Priority – Managing Investment Data End-to-End
It has become an imperative for organizations to have an end-to-end approach to managing the company, where strategic decisions are prioritized, and insights are data-driven versus ”from the gut” as in past; such are critical for the successful allocation and deployment of resources and capital across the entire investment lifecycle.
The Digitalization Imperative
Energy companies on a global basis have realized that their common objective of “2-3X growth per year” can no longer be enabled by proportional growth in headcount alone, as was the approach in the past. Organizations must change their data architecture and mindset to drive the new generation of higher operational efficiencies that are critical to enable faster scale and more effective use of valued resources. In addition, there are also higher expectations for energy executives to think strategically about new markets, new business models, new ways to accelerate growth in the face of rapidly changing market conditions.
“There are also higher expectations for energy executives to think strategically about new markets, new business models, new ways to accelerate growth in the face of rapidly changing market conditions.”
Challenges Faced Today
-
Employees involved in energy company investments spend 90% of their time collecting, managing and reporting on data and driving decisions, and only 10% on the more vital functions of analyzing data to improve decision making.
-
Over 80% of information required for investment decisions, use Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations for collecting, measuring, and forecasting investments, which are often silo’d in departmental systems or on employees desktop computers.
-
Legacy IT platforms don’t easily support the centralization, sharing and advance insight needed from today’s disparate technical and financial economic information across businesses, departments, and databases.
Key Insights
- 100 to 1 ratio of spreadsheets used (on average) across an assets life cycle. Thus, for larger enterprises, a couple thousand assets across their development, execution and operational lifecycles could drive millions of spreadsheets producing trillions of data points.
- Key to strategic, real-time (and future) decision-making is a centralized data repository connected to all workflows across the investment lifecycle where insights can be easily extracted in real-time because data, workflows, and spreadsheets are connected.
Why Focus on the Plumbing – Where Data is Trapped?
Organizations have traditionally grown up in a world of departmental data silos. As a company grows, those silos become increasingly disconnected until it creates a “plumbers problem” – pipes of data that are blocked from flowing freeing in between departments. In an energy company, this is especially common with data that doesn’t naturally flow across its origination, engineering, execution, and operations phases of its investment lifecycle.
Without a holistic, real-time view of data, it’s near impossible for executives to scalability make decisions about investments and budgets, which has created a new wave of “Digitalization” initiatives to drive the next generation of data-driven decision management to prevent: inaccurate forecasting, erroneous reporting, and poor investment decisions.
Enter Investment Lifecycle Management
While email, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations remain key operational tools for data collection and reporting, the idea behind Investment Lifecycle Management is that by putting a modern, end-to-end platform over those legacy applications and systems, energy executives can empower teams with flexible and intuitive ways to capture, share, and process data holistically across the entire organization (not stuck in silos), with automation to accelerate decisions and create a “learning” culture that is efficient, data-driven, and future looking.
To learn more about how Investment Lifecycle Management is changing the way energy executives drive better decisions and more efficient operations, contact Mercatus, download our brochure or watch this demo video for a full overview.
