Bangkok, Thailand – 9 September 2020: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that PTT Trading, a trading business unit of PTT Group, one of the biggest integrated oil and gas companies in Southeast Asia, is working with IBM’s services arm to implement automation and AI technologies to drive new efficiencies to its repetitive, task-based back-office business processes. With PTT Trading’s effort and support from PTT Group in adding AI and automation to both PTT Trading’s Bangkok and Singapore offices, the collaboration is aimed at making processes lean and improving operations accuracy for PTT Trading’s activities.  

As a trail-blazer in Thailand’s energy industry, PTT puts its strategic focus on cutting-edge technology to support its digital transformation, while also improving its speed to market, allowing it to make decision on the fly, supporting business continuity, and enabling itself to capture new business opportunities via five trading offices in major hubs around the globe such as Bangkok, Singapore, London, Abu Dhabi, and soon-opening US office. The corporation also realizes that complexities in energy trade and management, especially in today’s volatile markets, require robust data analytics, process automation and improvement, intensive risk control platform, as well as agile and dynamic working environment.  

In the past, PTT Trading’s financial operations, ranging from deal capture to accounts receivable billing and accounts payable payment involved time-intensive business processes and manual tasks. Working with the IBM Garage in a process discovery, PTT Trading found a number of processes related to financial operations activities that had to be addressed. 

“With our mission to expand international trading capability with commercial excellence in trading, operations and price risk management, exploring exponential technologies, leveraging the power of data, creating more intelligent workflows and putting agility at the center of our working environment have been key to our business,” said Mr. Disathat Panyarachun, Senior Executive Vice President, International Trading Business Unit, PTTPLC. “Re-architecting our processes and IT to enable agility, resiliency and business continuity, and to prepare ourselves for unprecedented business and economic challenges as well as new business opportunities, are now more crucial to our businesses than ever.” 

Working with IBM Services to deploy first phase of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), the software bots now help its employees manage and execute a wide range of repetitive, rules-based tasks that require handling high volumes of structured data. Analytics, machine learning and a whole ecosystem of capabilities such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies are also embedded to simplify, streamline and automate end-to-end business and operational processes 24x7.  

“While many companies are still experimenting with automation and AI, PTT Trading has taken a bold enterprise-wide approach today to address its challenges and quickly resume its ongoing digitalisation journey,” said Mr. Sawat Asdaron, Partner and Country Global Business Services Manager, IBM Thailand. “The ability to smartly process and manage data will be a key competitive advantage given the volatility of the sector, IBM is pleased to bring AI-enabled and automation solutions to support PTT Trading’s operations, enhancing its employees’ capability, allowing them to make better informed, data-driven decisions that result in lower-cost and improved back-end operations.” 

After the successful implementation of RPA’s first phase, total manual handling time for billing was reduced from 27,913 minutes to 6,898 minutes in six weeks. PTT Trading expects to achieve net saving of approximately 16.6 million Thai baht within three years. 

Automation has become one of the top two priorities of all organizations worldwide [1] and according to Forrester Consulting, the Robotic Process Automation market will reach $2.9 billion by 2021 [2]. More companies will find themselves pursuing functional automation with embedded AI and establishing long-term strategic partnerships to deal with a radically changed field of play.  

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References: 

[1] Coping with COVID-19. HFS Research, April 6, 2020. 

[2] The RPA Market Will Reach $2.9 Billion By 2021. Forrester Research. February 13, 2017. Report summary landing page accessed April 2018. https://www.forrester.com/report/ The+RPA+Market+Will+Reach+29+Billion +By+2021/-/E-RES137229  

Media contact 

Paranee Reymondon   
IBM Thailand Co., Ltd. 

Tel: +66 2 273 4164 Email: paranee@th.ibm.com