UPDATED 18:00 EDT / OCTOBER 12 2021

EMERGING TECH

Chevron sees increasing ROI after automating processes from the back office to well drilling

In an effort to streamline operations and automate certain tasks, Chevron Corp., a 142-year-old multinational energy company, turned to artificial intelligence-powered robotic process automation.

The company has seen increasing returns on its automation investments, while deepening its use of technology and expanding it to various areas of the organization. Today it has about 300 automations with more than 600,000 hours of work saved, according to Vicki Harris (pictured), manager of application platform engineering services at Chevron.

“There’s never appetite for automation on its own because you’re changing someone’s process, but what there is appetite for is the results,” she said. “So, in addition to value, bottom line, cost savings, we have people who are just improving their workflow for themselves, and so there’s also a sense of empowerment for them.”

Harris spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. They discussed the evolution of IT at Chevron over the past few years, the benefits brought by deploying the UiPath Inc. platform, the many use cases within the organization, and what the company expects for the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Similar use cases across the organization

Chevron’s automation journey began about four years ago, primarily involving proof of concepts. Because they proved their worth quite easily and quickly, the company decided to expand the program, according to Harris.

The automation provided by UiPath was then applied to the back office, first to the currency conversion work, which is often quite manual intensive in global companies. Soon, automation moved to other areas, reaching the oil well drilling mapping systems, which is part of Chevron’s core business.

“You’d be surprised. Some of those systems look kind of like your ERPs; they have kind of the same challenges,” Harris explained. “So, as we extend outside of traditional kind of HR, finance, audit practices into the rest of our business, the use cases are similar.”

With a whole-house approach now, Chevron aims to continue pushing automation.

“I wouldn’t want to set limits on ourselves in terms of what we can do, but certainly we’re looking at text analytics: How do we manage that document? How do we extract that data, use models to get that into our data lake?” she stated. “But there’s still always the work of finding that last mile of process; there’s many parts of our business still untouched, and so … we don’t want to let up on that.”

For companies just starting their automation journey, Harris advises: “Anybody who’s concerned about ROI, it’s so simple, it’s so easy; you should be able to find it in your first year. Obviously, it grows, but if you’re not finding some return in the first year, I would say, take a look at what you need to adjust, because it’s not that hard.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of UiPath’s Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath’s Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU