Thread regarding BP PLC layoffs

Why would any sector need to justify their “value” to you on this silly forum? Why not hold the incompetent leadership board accountable for their continuous bad decisions?

We all could be working out ar-e off to add value but it’s pointless when the captain is steering the ship into an iceberg.

For starters, there is not 17k people in technology. People need to stop counting NTIDs. For example over 700 auditors who show up once a year to do a few weeks worth of non-sense are included in "technology" counts. Iron Mountain. You know the company that handles the paper trash. There are dozens of employees from IM that have NTIDs and therefore are counted in the numbers, yet it's a service. Only 1-2 people do anything for bp in a given month, but since there company wants to ensure 24/7 coverage they have dozens with access to bp systems. They are counted in "technology" counts. I could go on and on. There is not 17k people doing techology work every day in bp, just not true. Murray loved to quote this non-sense. Reality is bp have far too many contractors still, but not all the employees are tech enough. That's the real issue.

@14p how so???

@p4 and even that is a mixed bag

A lot of great experts being given projects that sounds good but don’t add real value - either through being junk projects that can never deliver or mundane tasks that they are vastly overqualified for.
Seems like zero real informed ambition at the upper levels.

all of them should be cut except for oil and gas technology

CEO role would be great candidate for Artificial Ignorance...most bP CEOs preside over capital destruction that wouldn't be difficult to have done by a computer or an Affordable Indian.

@e3 100% they see procurement as a candidate for automation

@e4 response here doesn’t seem like good people skills…

"Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the he-l is wrong with you people?"

What really made no sense was procurement moving into technology…. Unless of course the plan is to lower the headcount in procurement by digitally running most of the work that procurement does today. And of course sending more roles to low cost centers.

Without many of them you perhaps would not be able to work productively, and not have access to the technology that enables you to help make the company money. Everyone plays a part, each entity/area is important. Many areas in bp are bloated, not efficient - similar to most companies I’ve worked in. Area like tech, P&C etc. may not make the money and are often seen as cost centres - but without them the company wouldn’t function.

I think there are different levels.

What and how efficient? There is a proliferation of contractors and 3rd parties, especially notorious Accenture/Infosys, coupled with a lack of proper engineering management.

Most people who manage tech never worked as engineers and it is outsourced to companies being paid per person per day, naturally it will be bloated

It is better now under Emeka, but still bad

Actual work can be split into many levers: necessity and value addtion work

Necessity is ERP, point of sale support, cybersecurity, network, hardware and software to run basic operations, data warehouse, storage and compute, and reporting.

For example, to run a public company, you need to report earnings. That needs to be extracted, transformed, loaded, and represented, from ERP to data warehouse to PBI/report.

Value-added work is creating new apps (e.g., "bp me reward" and many others) to engage with customers in new channels or do trading (trading is very tech-heavy, as you can imagine), or do pricing optimization in midstream or trying to reduce retail waste (it is a billion dollar problem)

There's also an applied science aspect to that, which is heavily important for the subsurface, as far as I understand, but it is not my area.

That is a brief overview