Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry is a typical example for which various business models, strategies, and affiliated interests exist, making it highly complex in terms of operations. The extended supply chain, from liquefaction to regasification, combined with multilateral contractual relationships that crossover, make efficient operation a challenging task. Considering barriers such as the volume of transactions, communication hurdles, etc., and the lack of contemporary management tools by shipping companies contrary to other industries, the paper proposes a model structure based on Business Process Modelling (BPM). The proposed BPM concept offers a holistic view of company organization and operations, as well as enables control of key performance indicators. Implementing intelligent computer systems to model an inter-organizational business environment to highlight and overcome such problems, is the ultimate goal of the study. This paper offers a coherent perspective of business process visualization across the midstream section of the LNG supply chain, including roles, tasks and resources. The research highlights commonly used business models, the contractual framework, and the physical processes. The volume of the information leads to knuckle points and dysfunctions related to time, transparency and work assignment. It is underlined that the occurring issues relate to the nature of LNG projects, business policies, safety and compliance issues, document transaction load and mishandling, disputes over SPAs, as well as to subjects of goodwill and partnership, unstandardized procedures executed empirically, and concurring office intervention. The aim of the study is the identification of the aforementioned problems that prevent an LNG shipping company from extracting the added value from its operation.
Using ontology for the representational analysis of process modelling techniques
