Speaking at the SAP SAPphire user meet in Boston this month, Mohammed al-Ruwaii, project manager with Saudi Aramco, presented of one of the largest and most far-reaching ERP deployments in the world. Subtitled ‘How to Move 9 MBOD in the 21st Century,’ al-Ruwaii’s talk described a ‘very high visibility’ in-house SAP development targeting the national oil company’s production and export sales. The project leveraged SAP Trader’s and Scheduler’s Workbench (SAP TSW), a component of SAP’s mySAP Oil & Gas industry solution.
Export
At the highest level, the project addressed supply and demand planning, distribution of oil products to the customer, billing and financial controls. The project addressed business challenges spanning sales, planning, financial and operations. These included a lack of inter-departmental business communication, duplication of data entry across applications, poor reporting decision support and a lack of data transparency and accuracy.
Legacy
Aramco currently deploys 11 systems to support its operations. The plan is to replace all of these with a single ‘comprehensive solution’ based on SAP’s Supply Chain Solutions. Aramco already deploys SAP APO, SAP TSW, SAP IS-Oil Downstream, and some SAP Business Intelligence tools for planning.
Terminal automation
Aramco has coupled SAP’s Terminal Automation System (TAS) with its SAP Global Hydrocarbon Sales for integrated planning, scheduling, movement, inventory management and billing. A ‘fully-fledged’ solution that is now ‘live’ for distribution, transportation, marine scheduling, ‘everything that relates downstream!’
Benefits
The single, global view and real-time cash forecasts, inventories and sales information are now streamlining Aramco’s operations. SAP roles provide ‘clearer boundaries of responsibility and segregation of duties.’ People know what processes they own and are authorized to maintain. An interface between the TSW system and the summit pipeline is now completely automated, eliminating paperwork and providing a solid audit trail. Everything, from contract to billing, including material, sales and nominations, is now under a single document flow. Aramco can respond to business changes and is planning to extend the system to e-sales and portals.
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