RPA Delivered via IPAC Service Center Established by PTT Digital

The Petroleum Authority of Thailand, PTT Group, is a state-owned organization responsible for the exploration, production, refining and distribution of the country’s petroleum products. Nearly 25,000 employees play a crucial role in ensuring a stable and secure energy supply for the people of Thailand. PTT Digital delivers IT services to PTT Group and is engaged in digital transformation efforts with help from an active SS&C Blue Prism digital workforce. PTT Digital’s successful automation program led them to establish the Intelligent Process Automation Center (IPAC) to share knowledge and specific automations with local Thai companies.

Challenge

PTT Group operates numerous subsidiaries and affiliates — PTT Exploration and Production, Thai Oil, PTT Natural Gas, Global Power Synergy and PTT Retail Business — and each specializes in different aspects of the energy sector. Operational efficiency is key, but maintaining smooth business operations across multiple large subsidiaries is challenging. Finance teams in each organization complete the complex, time-consuming and often repetitive tasks like month-end reporting and bank reconciliations. PTT Group wanted to increase efficiency in these processes and improve productivity for finance staff members.

Solution

PTT Digital implemented robotic process automation (RPA) five years ago. They began by focusing on key financial processes and have since scaled across the whole of PTT Group, expanding into other business functions like supply chain and IT.

One area that RPA has positively impacted is bank reconciliations — a process that assures that company records match the bank’s records and helps identify and resolve discrepancies. SS&C Blue Prism digital workers help with auto-reconciliation, statement verification, uploading records to internal systems and sending email notifications. They complete this process 72% faster than the manual process and have returned 560 hours (or 70 days) per month back to the business. 

A critical month-end process has been transformed too. Before automating the process, teams worked to reengineer it so that it was best suited to be handled by digital workers. The digital worker now pulls the data from multiple Excel spreadsheets and consolidates all relevant data into one spreadsheet. Then it logs into SAP, follows the application-specific rules and completes the necessary steps to finish the report. The time to complete this report has been reduced by 85%.

With many successful automations under their belt and a desire to rapidly scale these successes across all of PTT Group and beyond, PTT Digital established IPAC. This team aims to accelerate digital transformation and adopt RPA across the business. When IPAC develops a new automation, it can easily reuse it across the business. This saves PTT Group time and money and has resulted in the rapid adoption of automation. IPAC has taken its program to the next level — and created new revenue streams — by bringing its automations and knowledge to other Thai companies and offering to help them leverage RPA to refine their business processes.