Natural Resources Firm Standardizes on Ultimus to Accelerate Operational Effectiveness

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Background

Ultimus Client: Not Disclosed
Industry: Natural Gas Production and Transportation
Solutions: Multiple enterprise and departmental business processes

Our customer, one of the world’s largest producers and transporters of liquefied natural gas, embarked on an ambitious program to accelerate operational effectiveness. At the core of this effort is the automation of a wide range of enterprise, cross-functional, and department level business processes.

To make an undertaking of this scale successful, our customer sought to deliver initial quick, visible wins that would ensure additional funding to expand their efforts. As the program expanded, they sought to avoid the explosion of complexity and total cost of ownership that results from diffuse, uncoordinated, and tactical efforts.

Why Ultimus?

To make this plan a success, our customer sought to avoid the mistakes of the past: having to learn and support multiple automation platforms to handle the full range of processes they would need to automate; expensive custom coding workarounds to address missing platform functionality; architectures that do not support reuse and consistency; and confusing, inconsistent, and unfriendly user interfaces that drive up training costs and discourage user adoption.

The Ultimus Digital Process Automation Suite, called “one of the most comprehensive and well-thought-through digital process management systems on the market” by the independent research firm Deep Analysis, was uniquely suited to their needs.

Unlike other low-code software technologies, the Ultimus “industrial” approach allows organizations to create a “software factory” that makes the application composition vision championed by leading independent analysts a reality by providing:

• A standardized architecture that addresses process, case, task, and integration scenarios.
• Common portal, application, and usability functionalities that are pre-implemented, consistent, and no longer part of the development process.
• The ability to address unique customer requirements by creating reusable, inherently interoperable digital assets, instead of expensive, one-off custom programming.
• A “compose by reference” model that reduces complexity and makes global and family-level changes fast and error-free.

Ultimus’ built-in validations increase process efficiency, turnaround times, and data quality by automatically (a) preventing the submission of forms with data that is missing, inaccurate, or out of compliance with the customer policies and/or business rules and (b) guiding users to the problematic form fields.

The Outcome

The customer’s initial automation efforts have been highly successful and, after presenting their first-year results in a company-wide forum, high levels of satisfaction were reported among process owners, implementers, and end users alike, thereby securing funding for dedicated new automation hires to expand their automation effort.

In a little less than a year, the Ultimus DPA Suite was used to create 12 automated business process applications used by over 2,000 employees. These solutions span a wide range of use cases - from a Risk Assessment Process used in the analysis of all projects, capital expenditures, and production changes, to Asset Relocation and Disposal Approvals, to Incident and Security Investigation Management, among others.

The customer attributes their success to Ultimus’ unique strategically oriented platform architecture, as well as to its customer success engagement model. Ultimus solution experts co-developed initial solutions with the customer’s business analysts and process owners to provide real world experience, and to create the composable Ultimus assets and solution family structure that would minimize long term cost of ownership and maximize business agility. Within a few months, the company was able to quickly bring new hires up to speed and implement solutions independently.

Ultimus’ built-in document handling functionality reduces development effort and training by pre-implementing a document checklist with commonly needed document-related solution capabilities.