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September 29, 2023

PETRONAS drives quality decision-making with fast, easy access to intelligent data hub built on Azure

The dynamic Malaysian energy group, PETRONAS, has produced and delivered responsible and sustainable energy solutions globally since 1974. With more than 300 subsidiaries and operations in over 100 countries, PETRONAS has amassed an extensive wealth of data across its integrated value chain since its incorporation, making data a key business asset to drive strategic value. In 2020, PETRONAS embarked on its data transformation journey with the objective of making data available and accessible to everyone at the company through the Enterprise Data Hub (EDH), a unified enterprise platform supported by Microsoft Azure at the core. This platform has empowered employees with accelerated knowledge extraction and enabled enterprise analytics at scale, supporting PETRONAS’ ambition of becoming a data-driven organization.

Petrobras

Embracing a unified cloud-first approach

The first step was to aggregate data from multiple sources into a single unified platform. “The PETRONAS Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) acts as a data factory that facilitates analytics across data domains and business entities,” explains Habsah Nordin, Head of Enterprise Data at PETRONAS. “It pools data from across our integrated value chain and has made data available, accessible, applied, and actionable to PETRONAS citizens since its launch in 2021.”

“The Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) pools data from across our integrated value chain and has made data available, accessible, applied, and actionable to PETRONAS citizens.”

Datin Habsah Nordin, Head, Enterprise Data, PETRONAS

EDH is a cloud-based platform in PETRONAS’ data ecosystem with integrated architecture that has been built to be sustainable. The company uses Azure Data Factory for data ingestion, and Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Databricks to accelerate time to insights across its data warehouse and big data systems. Today, EDH ingests data from 280 data sources, has 18 data domains, and integrates 506 data types.

The next step was simplifying data access for users. “Our data assets are not only vast but also diverse, heterogeneous, and distributed. We wanted to empower all PETRONAS citizens with self-service capabilities to create a shopping-like experience when searching for data,” says Habsah Nordin.

Offering quick access to actionable insights

Launched in 2022, Data+ is a self-service portal and a curated data marketplace that enables the search and discovery of datasets from various domains. With it, all PETRONAS employees can access and understand the data at hand. 

Data+ has an intelligent search engine that provides higher-level search capabilities beyond those of a traditional keyword-based search engine. This was achieved with natural language processing, automated tagging, personalization to produce higher search accuracy, and a knowledge graph to provide context for undefined data.

In addition, users can now access information faster thanks to Azure Cognitive search services and automation, which create shortcuts for certain processes. Moreover, the process is also simplified with an inbuilt chatbot. Users simply key in requests and have access to results immediately.  

“An employee used to spend hours searching for information. Now it happens immediately with just a few clicks,” says Habsah Nordin. Faster access to more accurate search results enables employees to focus on getting their work done efficiently.

“An employee used to spend hours searching for information. Now it happens immediately with just a few clicks.”

Datin Habsah Nordin, Head, Enterprise Data, PETRONAS

Decision-makers within PETRONAS can now access data across many departments without going into multiple systems to source it. Today, there are more than 16,000 employees using the platform around the globe. “Ninety percent of our users have reported a shorter time to get information.  We’ve been able to shift our priorities and use our time and human resources more effectively, "says Habsah Nordin.

Having provided the gateway to data across the board, PETRONAS wanted to ensure that all employees could find easy analytic options for the data they have. Hence, it expanded Data+ to include the analytic marketplace, allowing users to leverage available, pre-built machine learning models to analyze and extract useful information from unstructured data easily. 

In addition, employees can visualize data better by using Power BI in conjunction with Data+. “We didn’t want our data hub to serve just data scientists, but everyone at PETRONAS,” says Habsah Nordin. “Our employees in different departments can draw new insights, discover new ideas, and take innovative actions without any need for coding knowledge to analyze data.”

“Our employees in different departments can draw new insights, discover new ideas, and take innovative actions without any need for coding knowledge to analyze data.”

Datin Habsah Nordin, Head, Enterprise Data, PETRONAS

Establishing healthy and reliable data 

Recognizing the risk of data exposure, Habsah Nordin also focused on laying the groundwork for proper data governance. As such, PETRONAS established a two-year data governance initiative to ensure the business stayed responsible and accountable for data quality. This included monitoring how data is ingested and processed, measuring data health, and remediating problems based on defined standards, as well as capturing information on data flows and transformation over time throughout the data processing pipeline. 

"PETRONAS employed an adaptive data governance approach to ensure that data is fit-for-purpose while balancing liberalization and control,” says Habsah Nordin. With it, PETRONAS was able to comply with various data regulatory requirements, including the Personal Data Protection Act in Malaysia and General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.

Building a brighter future through partnership

As PETRONAS embarked on its ambitious digital journey, it received the help of many technology partners as well as Microsoft. “The team at Microsoft really has our best interest in mind—it’s not just about pushing technologies but understanding how they can help us bridge any gaps,” shares Habsah Nordin. “They helped us turn EDH into a superior platform. Now, they keep us up to date with new developments within the industry that will help us stay ahead of the curve.”

In the future, she hopes to keep building on EDH and Data+ to drive better data analytics. This includes working with Microsoft to introduce an unstructured data program that will unify information across the enterprise using artificial intelligence and a large language model (LLM) to provide actionable insights on demand via embedded knowledge content analytics. “This will reduce the cognitive burden, mitigate risks, and empower our employees to achieve operational excellence,” says Habsah Nordin. “With the help of Microsoft, we can become a pioneer in technology innovation within the energy industry. I believe that’s the kind of exciting journey awaiting us at PETRONAS.”

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