The oil and gas industry is struggling with supply chain and green energy woes. Discover why enterprise architecture is key to meeting these challenges.
The oil and gas industry is undergoing a fundamental transition. Every enterprise is experiencing turmoil in the current environment, but changing times are having an even greater impact on traditional energy.
All markets are facing changing customer expectations, global unrest, and pressure to adopt powerful AI technology to reduce costs and increase efficiency. This is equally true for the oil and gas market.
However, oil and gas providers are also facing intense and increasing competition from renewable energy sources. A 2024 report suggests that 91% of green energy projects are now cheaper than traditional energy initiatives.
When you combine the increased public approval of renewable energy, and regulatory targets to reduce the use of fossil fuels, with a lower cost, green energy is becoming increasingly attractive. Oil and gas provision needs to be as efficient as possible to compete.
This, in itself, is becoming challenging with global political turmoil causing unprecedented disruption to the traditional energy supply chain. The oil and gas supply needs to be able to rapidly adapt to new sources to stay reliable against more localized provision.
For the O&G industry to survive, it needs to offer better service and greater value than ever before. The industry needs to transform if it wants to stay competitive.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can help oil and gas companies transform their business to meet the challenges of the current market, book a demo:
Transformation in the oil and gas industry is no different than any other business: it’s not just a one-off. Modern businesses need to turn transformation into a constantly repeatable capability to be able to adapt to the accelerating pace of change in the modern market.
With the ongoing supply chain turmoil being experienced in the Middle East, agility is vital for the traditional energy industry. Yet, this isn’t the only stressor on the industry.
A recent Deloitte report suggests that shale productivity gains won’t continue to increase as hydraulic technology has reached a plateau, while new oil production increased less than 2% between 2024 and 2025. To compensate, Deloitte recommends pursuing improved digital operations as a route to competitiveness.
With supply chains in flux and production increases proving a challenge, the only remaining way to maintain profitability is to transform digital technology to cut costs and offer new digital services to customers. That requires a technology transformation.
The key to any technology transformation is enterprise architecture: a methodology for tracking and optimizing your tech stack to fit your business strategy and day-to-day operations. The key to effective enterprise architecture is the right enterprise architecture solution.
Let’s look more closely at how you can leverage enterprise architecture to transform.
The first step in transforming the oil and gas industry is to understand its current state. You need to have full clarity on the state of your organization’s technology landscape before you can begin to move it forward.
Think of it like navigating with a map. Before you can work out what direction you need to go, you have to know where on the map you currently are.
Begin by documenting all the software applications that your organization currently uses and all the information about them you have. This needs to include:
how many employees are using each software application and what they’re using them for
where applications are hosted and what data they leverage
how much they cost and what contracts they’re under
what version of the software is being used, is it current, and what are the alternatives?
why was this software chosen over alternatives?
what hardware, other software, and data is the software dependent on?
what is the technical and functional fit of the software for your organization?
This is obviously challenging, and we hear many horror stories from organizations that are attempting to do all of this in a complex Excel spreadsheet. That’s why you need an enterprise architecture solution that can automate this process.
SAP LeanIX has a range of capabilities to help you gather, format, and maintain information about your IT landscape. This includes: automated discovery of applications through everything from single sign-on and finance systems, to a wide range of integrations importing Excel sheets, documents, and even diagrams to be parsed and formatted by our AI capabilities automated surveys to gather detailed information and feedback from your colleagues who use your applications every day much, much more
Once all this is input into SAP LeanIX, you can use our solution to perform analytics on this information and generate reports, diagrams, and dashboards. Many of our customers tell us that their leaders now prefer to see data live in SAP LeanIX over slide decks and presentations.
With all of this put together in a usable format, you can then start using it to plan for your future state and your road map to get there.
Once you have all your IT landscape information stored and analyzed by SAP LeanIX, it’s time to plan the ideal future state of your organization, so you can thrive in a changing oil and gas market. SAP LeanIX can help you out here too.
Our solution also has sandbox capabilities, allowing you to create a digital twin of your IT landscape and adjust it to your changing needs. This will create a detailed plan of your target architecture and ideal IT landscape for your organization.
SAP LeanIX even offers a best-practice meta-model and business capability maps to guide you in designing an optimal landscape for your specific needs. Perfect your tech stack by retiring outdated systems and re-investing in essential new technology like AI.
SAP LeanIX will then enable you to create a road map plan for moving from your current to target state, complete with checkpoints and a timeline. You can then change your vision and road map over time to adapt to your evolving organization and market.
The history of your changes will even be logged. This means you can actually drag a slider across the screen and watch your IT landscape evolve from the past into the future, all in SAP LeanIX.
The oil and gas industry is facing challenging times, but it can weather the storm if it adapts to a turbulent market and evolving technology. That, however, requires adopting transformation as a continuous business capability.
Any transformation capability must factor in your technology and SAP LeanIX is a market-leading solution to empower you to optimize your IT infrastructure and bring it in-line with your strategic goals. We even offer industry-specific best-practice guidance.
SAP LeanIX is completely agnostic and can work with any tech stack. However, combining SAP LeanIX with other SAP tools like SAP Signavio and WalkMe can offer a complete transformation toolset.
To find out more about how SAP LeanIX can help the oil and gas industry adapt to meet current challenges, get in touch: