ity up—for a longer period of time. “I think it
forces them really to take a sustained view of
how they’re going to reduce costs for the long
term,” England notes. Cost-reduction/operation-al efficiency features most prominently among
the following challenges and opportunities that
oil and gas companies are asking their consulting partners for help with:
n Operational Improvements
These opportunities—which are driven by tech-
nological advancements (e.g., data analytics)
and a need to lower costs—exist throughout the
enterprise. “This is really about the data that the
company is capturing,” Mendelovitz says. “The
data has to be standardized, reliable and visible
at the right levels within the company so that it
can be turned into information that allows you to
make better decisions.” Many of these decisions
focus on making operations safer and more ef-
ficient. “So much data is now available to our
clients,” says England. “If you look at upstream
operations, there exists a tremendous amount of
data concerning where they’re producing and
the various costs that go into the production pro-
cess. By applying better analytics to this data,
we can help them see where they’re most effi-
cient and where they’re experiencing pockets
of inefficiency.” England reports that similar
analytics can help companies reduce their asset
maintenance costs while achieving higher asset
uptime and reliability.
n Cyber Security
As oil and gas clients increase their reliance on
data and analytics, their cyber-security risk also
increases. “There is just so much data being
moved around—and a lot of it is coming from
remote locations—that we’re seeing more [in-formation] security issues,” England explains.
“We think cyber security is a top-of-mind issue
for everybody right now.”
The decline in oil prices has stimulated an increase in retirements
throughout the energy industry.
The retirement wave is most
pronounced in the oil and gas
sector, where retirement-aged
employees are choosing to leave
the workforce rather than soldier
through cost-reduction and op-
erational efficiency efforts. This
long-anticipated workforce shift is
referred to as “crew change.”
“More people are moving up
their retirements, so there is a
need to move less senior em-
ployees up to that same level of
expertise,” says Teri Mendelovitz,
North Highland’s Vice President
and Global Energy and Utilities
lead. “And that creates a slew of
challenges.” These include the
need for new training and develop-
ment programs, stronger leader-
ship development and succession
planning capabilities, and better
knowledge management and
transfer capabilities, to name a
few. Most of these activities need
to be reshaped in ways that are
more relevant to millennials.
This likely requires more than
injections of social media tech-
nology. Mendelovitz believes that
energy companies will need to
focus more on the “human expe-
rience” of all of their stakehold-
ers; this includes developing ways
to have more meaningful inter-
actions with current and future
millennial employees.
Utility companies are also con-
tending with a significant wave of
retirements, and a need to reso-
nate more with millennials.
“The new generation of workers
expects to work in an open-mind-
ed and proactive business culture
that is looking to evolve and even
to solve societal problems,” notes
John McCue, a vice chairman and
the U.S. Energy & Resources lead-
er at Deloitte. “Utilities have not,
traditionally, been thought of that
way… I believe that the percep-
tion of utilities needs to change
through their actions in order to
be an attractive destination for the
next generation of workers that we
will need to manage the industry’s
technology transformation.” —E.K.
