A Mobile App and a Chatbot walk into an O&G Plant

[alexd]

A Mobile App and a Chatbot walk into an O&G Plant. First person they meet is the CIO and the following imaginary conversation takes place:

• Chatbot: Hello sir, we have heard that your industry according to Deloitte’s Digital Maturity Index, has scored a mere average of 1.3, placing itself lowest on the spectrum compared to all other sectors.


• CIO: I don't like your tone son, do you have anything to offer?


• Chatbot: Of course! Myself and my partner Mobile App we are digital technologies which can help you to...<conversation stops abruptly>


• CIO: I have zero interest in applying digital technologies. I have lots of interest in saving money.*


• Mobile App: Do you have something specific in mind?


• CIO: I wish there was a way to experiment in cloud with minimum cost without disrupting our core business process but you might have heard also that 55 percent of oil and gas companies take six to 12 months to move from idea to implementation...what can I do?

Mobile App in a friendlier tone raises the following question.

• Mobile App:Have you ever tried to apply some Low Code / No Code technologies to improve your business processes?


• CIO: We would like to improve our Corrective Maintenance process...and I dont like to act as the technology gatekeeper...so here is a use-case that we have been discussing with the Plant Maintenance manager and the Operations Manager for some time now:

Use-case:

When the Field Engineers complete their work, the Maintenance Planners , before closing the Maintenance order, they would like to have a visual inspection of the work done, as an extra step of verification.

• Mobile App + Chatbot (with one voice): OK! Let's see what we can do!

---

Imaginary or not, this conversation is not far from truth. Money means time and resources and ROI of an application.

How many days, how much testing and how long your users would have to wait  to develop the following mobile app?

• Build a mobile App with a single button


• Click the button to activate phone’s camera


• Take a photo and post it in a data lake


• Share the App to your customers/users without worrying what mobile device they are using

SAP has a long story of UX and UI implementation offerings, with the latest and greatest one being the AppGyver platform.

With AppGyver you can build mobile apps in a drag and drop fashion and deliver fast, solutions that can affect your most critical operations.

First stop would be the developers.sap.com  getting a heads up on the AppGyver platform.

Your application at the end might look as below: Simple and minimalistic, since the users of this app will be wearing gloves and cannot type easily. Zero coding skills, mostly developed "by configuration".

The Field Engineer has just finished replacing an impeller and is taking a photo using a mobile device.

 

 

But how can you loop this back to the Maintenance Planner sitting at his desk?

Remember, the business goal is to connect the “field” with the “back-office” in the shortest time and with keep the core c(lean) way.

There are various ways to do so, ranging from ABAP coding up to dedicated Fiori Apps.

Here is another idea though:

Use a chatbot as an intelligent assistant which can be integrated with an S/4 system and be available at any S/4 screen. When the user (maintenance planner) is just about to close a maintenance order, he can ask the chatbot to retrieve visuals related to this specific order.

How many days or weeks, how much testing and how long your users would have to wait (again) to develop a personalised human-like conversation multilingual chatbot, deploy it in a secure cloud system and make it available to ERP users?

Take a look at the developers.sap.com  and you will see that with Low Code / No Code tools it is possible to build chatbots focusing straight away to the business problem and not on NLP techniques on how to analyse text inputs.

Conversational AI after some simple training with Low Code/No code techniques would be able to host a scenario (aka. conversation) able to handle commands like :

"Show me images for Maintenance Order with ID <placeholder>"

 



It is a state of mind.

Stop spending weeks and months on technical challenges that are blocking you to offer your business users meaningful solutions that can improve your business processes in short time.

Jump into the the Low Code/No Code era and one great way to do so is to take advantage of the Business Technology Platform free tier and start experimenting straight away.

 

Thank you!

Alex + The Chatbot and the Mobile App 🙂

 

*Quote taken from the great book of Bits, Bytes, and Barrels: The Digital Transformation of Oil and Gas