BP streamlines financial approvals and compliance with Nutrient Workflow
Table of contents
“Our users always had trouble finding the information before, but now employees know where to find it; it’s all in one place.”
Use case
BP sought a standardized method to digitize finance department requests, integrate with existing SAP systems, and ensure full compliance with Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) regulations.
Challenges
- Inefficiency caused by non-standardized paper “finance memos” that were difficult to track and often lacked appropriate signatures.
- Inability to track capital spend approvals across multiple decentralized locations, leading to significant delays in project initialization.
- Compliance risk regarding the tracking and archiving of data required under Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) regulations.
Solutions
- Successfully established compliance, at scale, by utilizing built-in reporting and analytics to create a complete audit trail of all financial control activities.
- Confidently unified decentralized teams through a flexible and enterprise-ready solution that integrates directly with SAP without duplicating existing financial functionality.
- Confidently automated the capital spend process using agentic features, enabling managers to set up, monitor, and adjust workflows in real time.
Results
- BP now accomplishes project approvals in as little as one day — a process that previously took weeks when using a paper-based system.
- BP is able to maintain complete visibility into project progress and end dates, with updates automatically reflecting in its SAP system to ensure balance sheet accuracy.
- BP now ensures that every financial request is routed through the correct delegation of authority (DLA), eliminating the storage and retrieval issues of the previous system.
Elizabeth Petrie, a capital planning controller at BP, identified that the convenience retail group needed a more regulated, automated system to replace the company’s reliance on manual paper trails. She understood that for a global organization of BP’s size, the dilemma wasn’t just about speed — it was about creating a standard, auditable process that could keep up with the company’s rapid growth and strict regulatory requirements.
Transitioning from paper memos to regulated financial oversight
As one of the world’s largest energy companies, BP operates in more than 100 countries with nearly 100,000 employees. Its convenience retail group in the United States found that the traditional method of using paper “finance memos” resulted in massive storage issues and inconsistent approval chains. The group realized this was affecting its ability to report accurately and was becoming a hurdle for SOX compliance.
The specific challenges included a lack of standardization in how requests were submitted and the inability for staff to quickly locate specific documents for audits. Additionally, with teams scattered across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles, the manual handoff of paper documents was creating weeks of downtime. The group needed a solution that was affordable yet powerful enough to bridge the gap between its field operations and its SAP-based financial records.
Petrie’s team discovered that Nutrient Workflow offered the exact balance of simplicity and power needed, providing specialized compliance tools without the unnecessary “overkill” of other enterprise platforms.
Orchestrating complex financial approvals with document-centric expertise
The implementation focused on replacing paper-heavy processes with document-centric expertise, turning divestment memos and site floor plan changes into intelligent, trackable digital assets. Nutrient Workflow was deployed to approximately 150 users within the asset management department, handling a couple hundred active projects at any given time. By ensuring the platform was flexible and enterprise-ready, BP was able to link these workflows directly to SAP, ensuring that data like project ending dates changed throughout the entire system simultaneously.
The solution enabled the team to work autonomously, providing Petrie with the ability to build and check approval routing logic beforehand. The automation of these internal controls enabled BP to reduce the extra time and cost of auditing while attesting to the effectiveness of its financial reporting.
One of the most valuable aspects of the implementation was the ability to adapt to the decentralized nature of the group. “I can create my own reports, I can change my own forms, and I can change the process whenever I need to,” said Petrie. This was critical for a team where approver designations might change based on specific market shifts across the country.
“Nutrient Workflow makes those quick changes transparent and I can see how everything is working.”
Achieving rapid ROI through real-time tracking and SAP integration
The results of the implementation were felt immediately, moving the organization from a “weeks-long” approval cycle to a system where a project can be approved in a single day. By achieving compliance, BP has transformed its audit preparation from a difficult manual search into a transparent process. The ability to track projects through to the end has also protected the company’s balance sheet, ensuring that any changes in project timelines are immediately visible and accounted for.
Before the transition, a project might sit on a desk in one city while a manager in another city waited for notification; today, users check their dashboard in real time, which enables BP to move forward with critical infrastructure projects without delay.
Velocity
BP reduced project approval turnaround from several weeks to as little as 24 hours.
Visibility
Asset management now tracks hundreds of active projects simultaneously with real-time updates synced to SAP.
Standardization
BP eliminated 100 percent of the storage and retrieval issues associated with its previous paper “finance memo” system.
Building a scalable framework for future energy operations
With Nutrient Workflow’s support, BP was able to solve its finance department’s digitization dilemma, moving from an unregulated paper trail to a high-speed, compliant automated environment. By enabling autonomous control, the platform allows the convenience retail group to maintain total control over its business rules while keeping its core financial data secure in SAP.
Petrie sees the success of the system as a blueprint for the wider organization, noting that the fuels group is already looking into expanding the use of Nutrient Workflow. As BP continues to grow its global footprint, the company is confident that its automated infrastructure is flexible and enterprise-ready, ensuring BP remains ready for the future and whatever it might bring.
