Armed with Cloud Solutions, Branded Oil and Gas Wholesalers respond to a Shifting Business Landscape
Branded Oil and Gas Wholesalers respond to a Shifting Business Landscape
In Need of a Makeover
The current method used by BWs relies heavily on manual processes, emails and phone calls between hundreds of geographically dispersed sites and head offices to aggregate demand, negotiate pricing for supplies, place orders and ensure on-time delivery. This needs to be replaced with cost-effective and scalable real-time demand, inventory and order management.
Until a decade ago the supply chain was fairly straight forward. Oil companies had full visibility and control over the entire supply chain (see Figure 1) and the information flow was from each retail outlet to a back office system, which was then used by different ERP modules to generate valuable information. That information was then used by the refinery and terminal for:
Figure 1: How the Old Order Changed
Doing it with Dashboards
The changed business model shifts the onus of managing the supply chain from the oil company to the BWs. The BWs don’t have the budgets to own, operate and manage massive ERP systems. This leads to:
However, it is possible for BWs to access advanced, cost-effective, collaborative and scalable suite of cloud-based Web applications that segment sites based on demand and the competitive landscape, provide dashboards with visibility into inventory, and use analytics to forecast demand. With the data and analytical engines now available, the BW will know, say, by location, exactly which products and their volumes are required. This will help them manage their scheduling at optimal costs.
The Vantage Point
The cloud-based solution has three advantages that BWs would welcome. First, they don’t need to invest in owning or maintaining IT infrastructure (hardware, software, security, backups, disaster management and IT skills), thereby staying asset light. They can leave this to the service provider, who will ensure that the latest infrastructure, technology and skills are always well within the reach of the BW.
Second, the BW does not have to worry about scaling. A BW can freely grow or shrink the number of retail locations without having to worry about how to scale the IT infrastructure or what to do with redundant IT assets.
Finally, given that cloud infrastructure is usage-based, the BW will pay only for what is used, making efficient use of budgets.
An additional advantage of a cloud-based solution is that it will always have high availability and reliability, which would not be the case in the event the BW decides to set up its own IT infrastructure and manage it.
The BW system architecture would be one where data from retail sites would be acquired by the BW using Web-based forms and/or automated inventory population on a scalable cloud platform. The BW would access this information on a rich visual dashboard capable of driving accurate decisions.
The dashboard would offer several capabilities and advantages to BWs:
Wipro helped an oil and gas major manage 50% of its production through a Collaborative Environment by enabling interfaces between disparate locations and teams.
e-commerce portal for Oil and Gas major to digitally engage with customers and personalize the relationship.
Wipro stepped in as the “thought-to-finish” partner for the O&G supermajor in this marquee demand sensing transformation program, delivered Proof of Concept (POC) to scale up across geographies and locations. The solution was piloted in the markets of West Europe and South East Asia.
© 2021 Wipro Limited |
|
© 2021 Wipro Limited |
Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences