Transformation Through a Digital Marketplace

The oil and gas industry, traditionally driven by large-scale capital investments and long-term contracts, is undergoing a rapid transformation as it adopts digital technologies. With the proven capabilities and impactful applications of these technologies, companies are increasingly seeking digital solutions to enhance production performance, reduce costs, and manage HSE risk to maximise shareholder value. 

The Challenge: Complexity in Technology Adoption

Oil and gas companies face unique challenges when it comes to adopting new technologies. The complexity of operations, coupled with stringent regulatory requirements and the need for significant capital investment, often makes it difficult to integrate and scale new solutions. The traditional approach to technology adoption typically involves multiple contracts, long procurement cycles, and significant operational disruption.

These challenges, combined with the rapid proliferation of solutions deployed across the industry, lead to slower growth and lower returns on investment. To address these issues, a new model is needed—one that simplifies technology adoption, reduces risk, and accelerates sustainable growth.

Streamba’s Fourth Party Technology (4PT) Model

The 4PT commercial model, inspired by Fourth Party Logistics (4PL) terminology, is designed to address these challenges. As an integrated SaaS marketplace, it provides a single platform where oil and gas companies can access a wide range of technologies and associated services across the supply chain, all under one contract. This model not only simplifies the procurement process but also allows companies to scale their technology adoption more efficiently.

Key benefits of the 4PT model include:

• Reduced Contractual Complexity: By consolidating multiple contracts into one, the 4PT model significantly reduces the administrative burden on companies. While the contracting process is time-consuming, so too are managing IT risks and addressing data privacy concerns. This allows them to focus more on their core operations and less on managing vendor relationships. 
• Cost Efficiency: By streamlining the procurement process, the 4PT model reduces administrative costs. Keeping abreast of new technologies and understanding their value proposition is a significant challenge and investment. The marketplace model brings these solutions to the Client.
• Incentivised Suppliers: The model builds on strong partnerships with key industry players, from established multinationals to early-stage emerging businesses. The structure of the model reduces the friction in changing suppliers and so incentivises the ecosystem participant to deliver high performance standards. Additionally, this model promotes collaboration on the latest technologies.
• Enhanced Scalability: The SaaS-based nature of the 4PT model means that companies can scale their technology adoption as needed. Whether they are looking to implement a single solution or a suite of technologies, the platform is flexible enough to accommodate their needs across their asset base.

How the 4PT Model Enhances Shareholder Value

With the rapid adoption of emerging technologies such as AI and the ever-increasing number of digital solutions being deployed in the industry, the need for a model that rationalises and simplifies the digital ecosystem is more pressing than ever. By simplifying technology adoption (increasing production performance), simplifying contracting (reducing costs), and enabling scalability (applying value more rapidly across the business), the 4PT model helps oil and gas companies achieve better financial performance and so ultimately translates to increased shareholder value.

Conclusion: The Future of Technology Commercialisation in Oil and Gas

As the oil and gas industry continues to evolve, the demand for digital solutions that drive value creation will continue to surge. Streamba’s Fourth Party Technology model is at the forefront of this transformation, simplifying the technology adoption process and enabling companies to scale operations efficiently. 

For shareholders, the benefits are clear: higher returns, reduced risk, and an incentivised, more sustainable supply chain. As the industry continues to navigate a complex and rapidly changing landscape, the 4PT model offers a powerful tool for unlocking new opportunities and driving long-term value.

We welcome your insights and invite you to join our community for regular updates on how the 4PT model continues to evolve and succeed.

Introduction: In the first of a series, we explore the key characteristics of Oil and Gas Supply Chains and introduce Streamba’s industry-specific technical, functional and commercial solutions, which we will further explore over the coming weeks.

The Case for Specialised Supply Chains

Global supply chains have evolved at an unprecedented rate since the pandemic, attacks on critical shipping routes and rising conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. These external influences have forced a rethink to the philosophy of “just-in-time” supply – increasing focus on production resilience. A plethora of digital solutions have sprung up to solve these challenges, some designed to address general supply chain issues common to all industries, others built to service a specific vertical.

Industry Challenges: The energy sector has unique supply chain challenges with respect to complexity and demand – sourcing expensive items, often bespoke to projects, and transporting these en masse to some of the most remote locations on the planet, and it isn’t forecast to get any easier: capital expenditures are expected forecast to rise from £4 trillion in 2012 to over £9 trillion by 2025. In some cases, entire supply chains are being established to service new markets, like Guyana.

The energy sector is distinct from other industries, and generalised solutions rarely prove sufficient in the long term. The specialised equipment, often hazardous to handle, requires a specialised vocabulary that underscores the intricacies and technicalities of the industry.

The Urgency of the Current Moment: In recent years, shareholder pressures have intensified, largely due to stagnant share prices over the last two decades. This financial scrutiny has propelled a shift in focus towards non-primary areas such as supply chains, pushing companies to transform these from static, high-inertia systems to dynamic models that can adapt to rapidly changing, industry-specific business imperatives.

Generic supply chain models simply fall short in addressing these complex needs effectively. As the pressures increase, so too does the need for specialised, industry-focused supply chain solutions, particularly in the Oil and Gas industry.

Embracing the Deep – Streamba’s Specialised Approach to Oil and Gas Supply Chains

Streamba’s Deep and Narrow Strategy: At Streamba, we have deliberately chosen a “deep and narrow” vertical SaaS approach over a “shallow and wide” horizontal one. By focusing our efforts on the Oil and Gas sector, we tailor our supply chain strategies to meet the nuanced requirements of this industry, thereby enhancing responsiveness, efficiency, and ultimately, value delivery in a constantly transforming landscape.

Getting Technology Out of the Way – Consolidation: Simplification through consolidation is increasingly crucial as companies narrow their focus to deploy technologies aligned with industry needs that can flex to adapt to changing conditions. This requires a strategic approach to data management, where the separation of data and applications ensures that an ecosystem of competing technologies can interoperate and share information seamlessly. This approach ensures that data is stored in secure, context-aware data lakes.

Value now and in the Future: Streamba’s Solutions are proven with the world’s biggest Oil and Gas companies to deliver value to control your Supply Chain and Logistics operations, reducing cost, protecting asset performance and maintaining HSE standards. This has been delivered through a technology stack that has proven its performance, reliability and security in a challenging environment. From this strong backbone, we are building out commercial, product and technical capabilities, to deliver the change that the industry is demanding. This includes the following topics, which we will cover in subsequent articles:

– Adaptive Supply Chain, creating improved production performance (revenue) through dynamic suppliers.

– A Fourth Party Technology commercial model, facilitating contract rationalisation, with reduced administrative cost, and a more dynamic supplier base.

– Our deep Contextual Data Models, are designed to integrate seamlessly with the unique terminology and standards of each energy major’s internal lexicon and processes, enhancing the rapid deployment of AI models.

Conclusion: The need for industry-specific solutions in supply chain management has never been more critical, especially in sectors as complex and demanding as Oil and Gas. At Streamba, we are committed to delivering targeted technical, functional and commercial solutions that meet these challenges head-on.

Stay tuned for our future blogs, where we will explore some of the solutions currently benefiting our clients and share insights into future developments in these areas.