Chevron Fueling Up for Cloud Future with SAP S/4HANA Transformation

As a leading multinational oil and gas company Chevron is dedicated to building reliable, affordable, and ever-cleaner energy in all operations, including with subsidiaries.

However, over time, it became clear that some of its complex legacy systems were not poised to meet the requisite challenges going forward, especially with SAP’s support for SAP ECC — an impactful solution in Chevron’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) portfolio — coming to an end in 2027. That’s why Chevron is now teaming up with SAP as a customer and co-innovation partner to transform its digital core and position itself for the cloud future.

“Our motivation was clear: We are embracing a more reliable digital foundation that can enhance production efficiency and enable faster, more informed decisions,” said Michelle LaPoint, general manager of Enterprise Digital Delivery at Chevron. “We wanted up-to-the-minute, forward-looking, embedded analytics and the ability to simplify enterprise processes, automate where possible, and innovate around the digital core going into the future.”

Designing a Clean Digital Core

Currently, Chevron operates on more than a dozen distinct ERP systems across its business segments. Given that complex landscape, and taking into account the varying processes across business units, standardizing business processes, data, and technology were top of mind for business and IT leadership.

“For a large company like Chevron, transformation is a global, phased, multi-year journey,” said LaPoint. “We want one common platform with standard data and processes and now we’re well on the path toward that goal.”

Historically, Chevron modified and customized its legacy systems to meet complex and varying global requirements. By transforming its digital core, the company is now working to position itself for whatever comes next, taking advantage of SAP’s standard cloud product to adopt new functionality as it becomes available in SAP S/4HANA. It is expected that this will enable Chevron to:

• Increase overall speed and agility
• Decrease total cost of ownership of business solutions
• Drive greater digital innovation

More so, through its co-innovation partnership with SAP, Chevron is working to position itself as a key player in what the “standard” product will look like in the months and years to come.

Co-Innovating, Collaborating, Communicating

For large customers, the standard functionality of SAP software may not perfectly line up with their sophisticated system needs and requirements. That’s where SAP’s co-innovation program comes into play. Partners like Chevron regularly connect with the SAP Services team to discuss their business needs and make their voices heard regarding the overall product road map going forward.

“This is just an extension of working closely with SAP as a co-innovation partner,” said Rajesh Sahajwani, services partner at SAP. “We are the design authority. We create the way ‘standard’ runs. It’s important that we are in communication with our largest customers, so we can find gaps, feed information to our product teams, and strengthen our future product road map. Ultimately, it’s all about building a better product.”

Chevron’s close collaboration with SAP in asset management is already delivering a reduction in future technical costs. This is made possible by Chevron’s strong governance efforts and positions the company as a unique SAP partner and customer going forward.

In other words, this partnership is expected to keep each company from remaining stagnant on the path to the cloud, so that tomorrow’s Chevron — and tomorrow’s SAP — will be even better than today’s.

Michael Mahoney is head of Services for SAP North America.