“Why do oil and gas remain important today?” asked Graham Young, VP EMS Operation at Harbour Energy, at the recent TAC Insights conference for SAP for Energy and Utilities in Toulouse.

“The global energy demand won’t stop growing,” he explained. “As renewables only provide a small share of the energy we currently use, we’ll still need oil and gas that are safely produced as we transition to a lower carbon world.”

Crude oil still remains indispensable where alternatives are limited, particularly in heavy transport and the chemicals industry, and natural gas plays a key role in the low-carbon transition, both as an energy source and in large-scale hydrogen production.

A unique model

What’s interesting about Harbour Energy, one of the world’s largest and most geographically diverse independent oil and gas companies, isn’t just that it’s big. What’s interesting is how it got big and how it operates differently from traditional energy companies. The company was founded in 2014 by private equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners with a goal to build a global, independent company by acquisition.

“We’re basically trying to solve a very hard problem. How do we scale like a major, but stay agile like a startup?” Young said during his presentation about Harbour’s rapid growth journey. He explained that in a company that grows through acquisitions and runs multiple ERP systems, the role of technology is less about “one system” and more about connecting everything, standardizing insight, and accelerating change.

Masters of integration

Most oil and gas giants grew over decades. Harbour did it in about 10 years by pursuing an aggressive strategy of mergers and acquisitions, buying assets such as oil fields from industry giants like Shell. The company also scaled rapidly across 11 countries giving it a broad geographical reach. Crucially, Harbour Energy was often able to integrate acquisitions within a year, demonstrating a rare combination of speed and integration.

“A lot of companies struggle after acquisitions,” Young said. “Systems break, processes clash, value gets lost. At Harbour, we focus on quickly stabilizing new assets, extracting synergies early, and reducing operating costs even while growing.”

Young’s team took a different approach to technology. While most companies push for one massive ERP system, Harbour doesn’t blindly take that path. It runs multiple ERP systems when it makes sense, focuses on fit-for-purpose architecture, and uses tools to connect processes rather than force everything into one box. Such flexibility is a big advantage for a company that keeps acquiring new businesses.

The digital backbone

Because Harbour Energy operates multiple ERP systems rather than a single monolithic platform, complexity is unavoidable. SAP’s integrated tool chain, particularly SAP LeanIX solutions and the SAP Signavio portfolio, connects this landscape by aligning processes, linking capabilities to systems, and providing a unified view of ‘what’s where,’ ultimately creating visibility across an otherwise fragmented environment.

“Before we implemented the SAP tool chain, processes were hidden in Excel and PDFs. It was all part of the local knowledge we acquired,” Young said. “We had no clear view of duplication or inefficiencies. For example, we found that we had dozens of HR systems, which we were able to reduce by half.  We were able to consolidate 33 different ways to do travel expenses into just one.”

One major impact is speed. Whereas traditional transformation planning took up to 24 months, now, with the tool chain and process modeling, key design cycles can sometimes be achieved in four to six weeks. This is enabled by standard process templates and automated modelling for faster validation cycles leading to faster execution of integration and transformation programs.

In addition, tools like the SAP Test Automation solution by Tricentis and SAP Cloud ALM for application lifecycle management help ensure that releases are safer and fewer operational surprises occur during go-lives, which is critical in an industry where downtime is expensive.

By connecting systems and processes, the tool chain enables cost transparency across business units and investment prioritization based on real data. This directly supports financial discipline and shareholder value creation

For a company built on acquisitions, probably the biggest value driver is that the tool chain helps rapidly map the systems of acquired companies and compare them against Harbour’s core model identifying what to keep, retire, or migrate. This is why Harbour can integrate acquisitions quickly instead of getting stuck in years of IT consolidation.

Structure before automation

Only when processes are structured and visible can they be used for automation, which is why these tools all play a crucial role in enabling AI adoption. Standardized workflows and process maps are input for AI tools, and digital adoption platforms guide users through systems.

The three key engines provided by the SAP tool chain include:

• Transparency engine makes the business visible end-to-end
• Standardization engine aligns processes, systems, and capabilities globally
• Acceleration engine speeds up M&A integration and transformation delivery

Together with SAP Analytics Cloud for global forecasting and planning, these tools are at the heart of the company’s successful business transformation.

Young listed the three strategic levers keeping the company strong, resilient, and ambitious. The first is maintaining strict financial discipline, followed by using data driven insights that ensure the company remains competitive, and, last but not least, equipping the business teams with advanced capabilities ensures resilience.

“The SAP tool chain allows us to grow aggressively through acquisitions without collapsing under complexity,” Young concluded. “It’s essentially the difference between chaotic expansion and controlled, scalable growth.”