Advent of The Digital Representative in Downstream Energy

With the coming of the hyper automation and digital technologies, the distributor sales force, which forms the core of secondary sales, are gearing up to leverage this more than ever. The success of any distribution business critically depends on the right technology enablement of the distributors specifically in the Energy downstream segment. The ability to beat the competition from other petrochemical product manufacturers including different lubricant product segments and chemicals through wider and broader customer base is key to success.

Reimagining the Digital Distributor Sales Force

Let us look at the potential of automation and digital enablement of day-in-life scenarios of distributor sales representative (DSR) and distributor sales managers (DSM). A DSR is required to travel much to reach dealers in multiple locations within a specified time window. A GPS enabled mobile app with a route planner & optimizer with the underlying AI engine can prove to be a great resource in such scenarios. With its help, the shortest route can be planned for the individual in advance. A pre-planned daily and weekly beat scheduler with built in route planner can augment the productivity significantly. A cognitive mobile AI engine can push notifications to the DSR using the GPS location services to intimate the DSR of other prospects in the nearby locations who fit pretty much the same profile of DSR ‘s other customers.

Smart Ordering is another key enabler in the DSR digital journey. DRS can create orders while on the move in a hands-free manner using voice recognition engine or motion gesture. In the event there is no internet connectivity which can be the case in remote locations, the DSR need to be able to store the data in offline mode. These offline orders would then be synchronized to the distributor back office system once internet connectivity is available.

The ability to predict and recommend insightful information to the DSR is a key to winning more customers. A predictive analytics engine on mobile can be deployed to scan through historical sales and trends to identify patterns. These patterns can be used to recommend the type of lubricant segment and classifications that are best suited to meet certain customers within a territory.

DSRs can be assessed using KPI s that reflect their performance on a quarterly basis. Rewards and recognition plans can be pushed to mobile platforms to track every DSR against a set of targets and send mobile notifications to let them know of progress.

Advent of The Digital Representative in Downstream Energy

Oil companies too derive significant benefits from these enablers. Several insights can be drawn using the aggregated sales information at a region / territory levels. This enables informed decisions on the part of Oil companies to promote the right products to the right distributors.

All these capabilities can be offered on a SaaS pricing model to reduce the total cost of ownership by the distributor principals.

Future Promises

A new wave of automation and digital enablers in form of mobility, AI and advanced analytics can be leveraged to accelerate the productivity of DSRs . This, in turn, means higher sales volumes for the distributor owners and which aggregates to the oil companies whose products are being sold. The potential is significant and the benefits far out weighs the cost in the long run.

About the Author

Sandipan Chakraborti

Oil & Gas Downstream | Associate Consulting Partner - Energy, Natural Resources & Utilities

Sandipan is a domain solution architect working on diverse business problems for fortune 100 oil & gas clients. The areas of his coverage range from adoption of alternate energy trading platforms , digital strategies for the enterprise, and modernization of applications in Petchems and manufacturing segment

Sandipan is a TOGAF certified Enterprise Architect and AWS Certified cloud architect. He has a 18 years of consulting experience having worked with PwC , TCS and IBM prior to Wipro. He holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Mysore University and Masters in IT & Computer Engineering from Indian Institute of Engineering Science & Technology. He has published blogs and papers in reputed journals.

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