Easy Modeling of Alternative Organizational Structures at Neptune Energy

Today, Neptune Energy is a leading, international exploration and production company with 1.800 employees across eight countries. But in fact, the organization as we know it now is not that old. Neptune was launched in 2015 to invest in large oil and gas portfolios. In February 2018, it completed the acquisition of the worldwide oil and gas exploration business of ENGIE Production International, and quickly went on to make additional acquisitions to strengthen their gas weighted, longlife, low-cost portfolio.

Needless to say that with such formation comes the sometimes challenging process of bringing everything together and creating a common foundation. Of course, this includes an organization’s values, its mission and vision. But on the more practical side, this also applies to business and HR data. Based on this information, organizational structures and hierarchies need to be modelled, harmonized and understood, workforce plans must be created to meet business goals, and forecasts developed to allow comparisons between the status quo and budgeted plans.

A first step within Neptune’s HR department was the combination of all HR data in the SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) system. While doing so, it became clear that due to the different tools and systems used in the past, the subsidiaries’ data maintenance differed. In SAP’s HCM system this showed as false or incomplete entries. The easiest way to detect all data gaps was to visualize the data, e.g. as an organizational chart.

In addition to this challenge, Neptune wanted to create a complete overview of the new organization structure that included all offices and plants. As you can imagine, the best way to achieve this is also through an org chart. In the past, each subsidiary had used a different method of keeping the structure up to date. This included drawing programs as well as Excel sheets. In the future, there would be a ‘single source of the truth’ for the structure.

Last but certainly not least, the E & P company’s goal was to be able to forecast their organizational capability to enable the strategic business plan and model the organization structures and costs required to deliver that capability. For this, it was crucial to be able to rely on a single source containing all necessary information.

When reviewing Ingentis org.manager and its feature set, Neptune discovered that not only would the org charting software seamlessly connect to their HR system. Ingentis org.manager also comes with a flexible set of features that allow for intuitive workforce modeling and reorg simulation. Finally, thanks to the timely software implementation, the investment was minimal and the timeline to fully integrate the tool was just a matter of weeks.

Today, Ingentis org.manager is a critical business system at Neptune Energy, that forms the foundation of everyday processes in the HR department as well as for the finance teams and executive managers.

The org chart perspectives provide insights regarding the current structure of the organization and are enriched with icons to highlight key performance indicators. This helps answer questions about current employees, their positions and responsibilities, and how it all comes together as one. The ability to display the line and functional reporting relationships, visualizing ‘the matrix’ structure, is valuable.

In addition, the visualizations delivered by Ingentis org.manager serve the company’s management in understanding and controlling workflows within the business. When it comes to future projects where it is crucial to look at the status quo as a starting point, the insights provided via the org chart, visualized KPIs or big data graphs are invaluable.

In their annual business planning process, Neptune uses this information to estimate if it is possible to achieve certain goals within the next 24 months with the current workforce and budget. What is available and what will be needed?

What supports these discussions today is the fact that Neptune can be sure that all necessary data is at their fingertips at the push of a button. In the past, one would have to invest precious time into gathering data from all the different sources. Now, the teams can dive deep into the critical business drivers and company goals and need not worry if their information is incomplete or incorrect.

Of course, when discussing the future and working on new strategies, one might find that changes are necessary to meet upcoming requirements. This is where the simulation feature of Ingentis org.manager comes into play: In order to test possible organizational models of the future, Neptune reverts to the simulation environment on a regular basis and evaluates which of the newly created scenarios supports their plans best. Their focus lies on the impact of structural changes on key metrics such as budgets and headcounts.

Now that Ingentis org.manager has helped create a clean set of core data, it is being introduced into more and more of the business processes across the organization. For example, this applies to reforecasting in the finance department: In order to reduce duplication and inefficiency, and to improve insight, the data visualized by Ingentis org.manager is used to compare the monthly actuals with budget plans, and to provide an accurate full year forecast for all organizational costs.