Shell Oil Products Divide And Conquer With KALIDO
INTRODUCTION
Shell Oil Products (Shell OP), the worldwide fuel and lubricants businesses within the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, have launched a global sales and marketing information platform based on the KALIDO application suite (KALIDO) – bringing vital intelligence on customers and marketing initiatives. The solution is designed to bring clarity and speed to performance measurement, and produce harmonised, segmented management information, helping Shell OP market their products more effectively.
“The key benefit of KALIDO is that it will give us a deeper insight into customers and how we are currently serving them. It has really increased the options open to us as a global business, because we will be able to connect data from different operational units to get a clear breakdown of our customers worldwide,” Jim Smitheman, MI Manager for Shell International Petroleum Company Limited.
GLOBAL VIEW OF CUSTOMERS AND PRODUCTS WITHOUT FORCING STANDARDISATION
Shell OP are one of the five core businesses that make up The Royal Dutch / Shell Group of Companies.
They operate in more than 100 countries, supplying fuels and lubricants directly to customers in marine, aviation and commercial sectors, and via an extensive retail network to motorists everywhere.Shell OP needed to segment their global business to gain a better understanding of products, customers and channel profitability. They also needed to monitor the performance of global marketing initiatives without affecting the local organisation of operating units.The semi-autonomous nature of Shell OP’s constituent local companies meant that there was no common data standard for management information, making global customer and product management time-consuming, inaccurate and inefficient. Business analysts were spending much of their time gathering and classifying data, and very little time actually analysing it.Using KALIDO, Shell OP have linked management information systems across 85 separate operational units, creating a truly global view of customer and product data for the first time.
The solution brings together management information to support standardisation and segmentation, as part of the broader Oil Products Management Information System (OP MIS) project.Jim Smitheman, MI Manager for Shell International Petroleum Company Limited, comments on the benefits: “On the sales and marketing side, the solution will bring consistent global segmentation, without imposing a new organisational structure on operating units, or requiring them to re-implement their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which, given the scale of our business, would have taken a significant time to achieve.”Customers, products and channels are now coded consistently across the globe, giving management a crystal-clear view of country-to-country performance. The solution will allow us to understand what we’re selling, who we’re selling it to, and how we’re selling it.”We now have an Information Intelligence system that will accelerate our insight and allow us to respond to business change quickly and with the most appropriate strategy.”
DRIVERS/SOLUTION
With multi-national customers increasingly demanding a single point of contact, Shell OP needed to move from a local to a global view of its business.
The structure of Shell OP made this difficult, because vital management information was trapped in local customer information systems. The lack of integration between these systems meant that any attempt to collate and compare data across regions was difficult and time-consuming. Before attempting to make any comparisons, analysts had to manually reclassify data because the same products and customers might have completely different codes in two neighbouring countries.Recognising the need to globalise their operations, Shell OP initiated the OP MIS project to draw management information from diverse data classification systems in a single consistent format. OP MIS aims to standardise and segment management information without affecting the local organisational structure, and one of the key areas it covers is Sales and Marketing.
The Sales and Marketing component of OP MIS uses a series of federated KALIDO warehouses to draw together valuable customer, product and channel profitability information from disparate global systems, giving a consistent view of activities around the world. Global customer account management teams will now be able to determine margins, volume, and proceeds by channel for any product in any country or region.Managers can see how much of a particular product line is sold to a given customer segment, and can look at total proceeds, distribution costs, and the gross margin. This gives vital feedback on the performance of central marketing initiatives, showing whether they have delivered bottom-line improvements.KALIDO will also allow global customer account managers to view large customers by subsidiary in all the countries in which they operate; with a growing number of customers choosing to negotiate on a global basis with Shell OP, this information is essential for the effective management of these customer relationships. Jim Smitheman comments: “Where multinationals are concerned, we can view a hierarchy of their subsidiaries in different countries, so for the first time we can see the full picture of our dealings with any customer.
This kind of segmentation allows us to compare country-to-country performance and focus on new revenue opportunities.”
When standardising management information reporting through the OP MIS initiative, Shell OP needs to be sensitive to the individual needs of worldwide operating units, as Jim Smitheman explains: “Individual countries need to be able to segment data in ways that have no relevance globally, for example in order to comply with local legal or reporting obligations. KALIDO accommodates this while permitting a full global overview.
Operating units can add local dimensions to the core model, for example in order to measure the performance of sales teams.”This flexibility is a key and unique advantage of KALIDO: its federative approach to information management permits any number of localisations to co-exist with the common corporate data model, giving a consistent top-down view without forcing a structure on individual operating units. This allows Shell OP’s segmentation criteria to be applied globally, which is vital because marketing initiatives are increasingly determined at the global level.Shell OP now have a consistent global view of customers, products and supply channels, which will enable them to develop, implement and measure global marketing initiatives. Jim Smitheman says: “With information classified on a consistent basis around the world, we can see whether marketing initiatives are actually working.
Previously, there was no mechanism for doing that.”KALIDO will be used as the key technology for integrating existing systems with those of Shell OP’s newly-acquired US operations. The US arm of the business was originally a joint venture between Shell Oil and Texaco, and has a completely different business model. The KALIDO software brings fast, business-focused configuration in a repeatable solution. Its flexibility and ability to cope with dynamic business models without affecting underlying data relationships make it the perfect tool for the integration task.
IN SUMMARY
ProblemShell OP needed to segment global customer, product and channel information to support and monitor global marketing initiatives. Shell OP also needed to standardise management information without imposing new structures on local operating units, which have local data models and systems.
Solution
Shell OP has launched a global sales and marketing information platform to link management information systems across 85 separate operational units using KALIDO. It brings together management information to drive standardisation and segmentation, as part of the broader Oil Products Management Information System (OP MIS) project.
Benefits
- Consistent global segmentation, accommodating local variations
- Deeper insight into global customers and products
- Improved measurement of global marketing performance
- Full breakdown of sales information by product and by country
- Faster, more efficient collection and analysis of data
