Ushering in a digital workforce

Aramco strives to enhance the working environment for employees and boost productivity by deploying robotics process automation (RPA). Aramco’s Information Technology (IT) has already deployed many digital robots that are handling a variety of processes in our operation; starting from updating employees’ HR profiles with new assignments, up to assigning oil tankers to proper berths as part of the Oil Supply Planning and Scheduling operation.

In Aramco, the deployed RPA robots have saved more than 120,000 man-hours annually. Analysts have identified more than 60 RPA use cases to be implemented during 2021-2023, covering different organizations within the company.  

RPA benefits
Cost-effective, scalable, and easy to implement. This is the biggest difference and advantage that RPA has over traditional automation techniques that rely on back-end automation, requiring massive IT transformation, huge investments, and complex decision making/approval cycles.

By 2024, the program plans to scale up the deployment of RPA technology in Aramco to cover a majority of our business processes by introducing more efficiency and cost saving in our operation, striving to save 1,000,000 man-hours annually. These productivity gains will contribute to the company creating value in the most efficient manner, which is in line with best practices being adopting by leading corporations. 

More time to contribute and learn 

With employees relieved from the repetitive tasks due to RPA deployment, they are empowered to focus on more valuable and meaningful work. Personnel can also use the extra time to take more training, mentor or be mentored, and maintain a life-work balance while achieving set targets. This will enhance the working environment while allowing employees to realize their full potential, ensuring that the company continues to attract and retain the best talent in the world. 

RPA Center of Excellence

To accelerate the achievement of the set goal for productive gains, IT is establishing the RPA Center of Excellence to support the rapid transformation and scaling of RPA at the enterprise level while controlling associated risks, managing automation investments, and monitoring the automation program.

What is RPA? 

RPA is a technology that mimics the actions of a human performing a rule-based process. It interacts at the application/interface layer of any application and performs the exact steps, just like anyone working across multiple applications. 

It is capable of mimicking many human user actions. RPA can log into applications, move files and folders, copy and paste data, fill in forms, open emails and attachments, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, web scrape (collect data from the web), and so on. 

IT deployed the RPA for the Marine Department to automate daily marine vessel logging activities where the deployed robot automated the daily manual vessel’s activity logging process for approximately 300 vessels into the Marine Operation Management system. The RPA solution will reduce operational cost, and improve the quality and accuracy of daily reports, with an estimated 46,800 man-hours saved annually.