The largest capital investment ever undertaken by Bapco in its 90+ year existence is changing the company into a more modern, complex, competitive, profitable and environmentally friendly facility, ready to meet the needs of the industry and Bahrain’s Vision 2030. By transforming Bapco into one of the region’s most competitive and environmentally responsible refineries, the multibillion-dollar Bapco Modernization Programme (BMP) investment will help the Kingdom’s long-term socioeconomic sustainability.

In July 2022, the BMP Flare Stack was successfully erected and in December 2022, Berth 1 and 3 Loading Arms were successfully commissioned. By the end of 2022, the project had more than 20,000 direct and indirect people working in the greenfield and brownfield sites. More than 15 subcontractors were involved in performing different tasks totalling approximately 1.2 million manhours per week.

The Procurement and Contracts department successfully released two dashboards to streamline the current procurement processes as part of its digitisation transition. Phase One of the journey is represented by the dashboards. To better manage the inventory and guarantee prompt delivery to users, the first dashboard was developed to show the status of purchase orders, requests for quotes, and procurement requests. For improved contract management, the second dashboard offers a complete view of all active contracts.

In 2022, Bapco continued its digital transformation journey with consistent actions taken along the three programme pillars of digital governance, digital leadership and digital execution.

Bapco launched its purpose-built Digital Factory, a digital execution group tasked with delivering digital products using data analytics while also encouraging collaboration and innovation among IT, business subject matter experts, and industry and academic partners. Bapco has delivered more than twenty digital products in the areas of data and analytics, mobility, and workplace collaboration, keeping the focus on value creation.

Creating a data-driven culture is probably the most important pillar of the Company’s digital transformation towards the “Bapco of Tomorrow,” where teams are empowered to use insights for improving decision-making and to make processes more efficient and effective.

Bapco IT & Digital initiated the “Data Champions Programme” with the goal of improving data literacy across the company and equipping employees with knowledge and efficient self-service data analytics tools. The department trained a group of 25 business analysts, who took part in the first phase of the programme, which started in June 2022. The group received structured hands-on training on data analytics techniques and self-service Business Intelligence (BI) and worked on specific projects that involved data cleansing, data processing, and data consumption and visualization using the Enterprise Data Bank prepared by IT & Digital. The Enterprise Data Bank is at the core of the IT & Digital strategy to introduce a data-driven culture, thus helping the users make faster, more consistent, fact-based business decisions. This modern data platform helps to improve the availability, accessibility, and reliability of the data, as well as provides a marketplace for business users to access and acquire data and information.

Bapco continued to invest in the modernisation of its core ICT infrastructure and increased its cloud footprint for improved agility and availability. IT & Digital continued to support employees’ mobility needs by providing secure remote work facilities and digital communication and collaboration tools.

IT & Digital enabled business transformation efforts in several areas, from Human Capital Management, where it digitalised the full hire-to-retire employee cycle, to Marketing and Supply, where they implemented a best-in-class commodity trading and risk management platform to strengthen the Company’s trading capabilities.

In today’s interconnected environment, information is exposed to a variety of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities. Bapco continued to invest in information security to safeguard technology, assets, and critical information, as well as to safeguard its reputation and avoid any damage or loss caused by unauthorised access to its systems and data.

To ensure that its cybersecurity standards keep pace with the ever-growing threats, the IT & Digital security programme incorporates cutting-edge initiatives such as the Zero Trust and Unified Cybersecurity models.

In 2022, Bapco completed the first Bapco IT & Digital Graduate Programme with a batch of ten talented Bahraini graduates.

Through the strategic OMEGA programme, Bapco continues to sustain and enhance the Company’s efforts to become a more commercially driven organisation with competent people supported by the best practices, systems, and processes, while maximising financial gain for the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Following the design and development of a commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) system, Bapco has successfully rolled out the CTRM system modules for the sale of all products and Abu Safah crude in 2022. This follows the successful implementation of Aviation Jet A-1 Fuel and Asphalt Sales in 2021. The system is fully tested and integrated with the Finance ERP system and provides comprehensive analytics and reporting. In 2022, the local marketing systems were updated or enhanced in conjunction with the vision of better integration and increased automation.

During the year, more than 70 procedures and governance policies based on the updated business processes (completed in 2021) were drafted and finalised.

To ensure a robust yet smooth transition into the future, a newly designed organisational structure for the Marketing Division, along with the relevant job descriptions and headcounts for each position title, was designed. This has been submitted to an external consultant as part of the overall corporate organisation structure review, with the expectation that it will be implemented during 2023.