Executive Summary
In a cluttered and competitive market, trust is often the only differentiator. By focusing on building it Nishi Vasudeva transformed HPCL into one of the country’s most trusted petrol retailers.
The job of the CIO in a public sector petroleum company can be very tough, especially when it involves tweaking what thousands of consumers think of a brand. For consumers of
HPCL's products these impressions come down to two things: the quality and quantity of the fuel they pay for. Over the last few years rumors of diluted fuel and tampered gas dispensers (which deliver less fuel than the meters claim) have haunted petrol players. The Rs 1,16,428crore HPCL knew that the burden of proving their trustworthiness lay with it. By making this one of her centers of focus, Nishi Vasudeva, executive director-IS, HPCL, drove a 'good quality, right quantity' push that altered the way customers viewed HPCL.
Case Study Highlights
- Trust can change the course of a business. By building it across millions of customersNishi Vasudeva earneda place on our list of transformative leaders.
- The retail automation system not only assures quality, quantity but service to the end customer, too. It offers the convenience of various modes of payment.
And she changed one of the most intangible of business drivers, trust, with one of business’ most structured tools: IT. And how? She started by placing forecourt controllers at each bunk. Basically, the controllers monitor most of the processes at gas stations including the quality of fuel that's being offloaded from trucks, the amount of inventory retailers have, and the amount of gas coming out of a dispenser.
“This ensures that there is total control over what is getting out of a tanker and every drop that goes out from the nozzle,” says Hariharan Kumar, GM, HPCL Retail SBU, HPCL. “Since dealers cannot tamper with the product, quality is assured. They cannot shortsell customers either because the dispensing units are automated. Cheating is not possible. The main objective was to provide customer confidence by eliminating manual intervention.”
That’s exactly what Vasudeva wanted. “The idea was to impart efficiency to our retail customer and ultimately build trust on both the quality and quantity fronts,” she says. And that brand exercise puts her in a league of transformative IT leaders. How so? Because to understand the needs of the market, to place a finger on the needs of end customers, and to look for solutions to solve challenges at both levels requires more than a technology-oriented executive.
There’s no doubt her work with the retail automation system created a huge boost in customer confidence. Proof of that trust can be found in a 2009 AC Nielsen study on India’s most trusted brands. The study, which looked at different parameters including trustworthiness, a credible image and quality, cited HPCL as India’s most trusted petrol retailer.
But creating that level of trust across a customer base as large as HPCL’s was hard work. In addition to the massive challenge of deploying the technology with its gauges and instruments in each retail outlet,
Internally, too, the data that the controllers sent back had to be translated into useful information. Sales personnel at HPCL needed to be armed with the ability to deduce inventory requirements, stock information, sales figures from a centralized dashboard at a regional office level that took care of about 20-30 dealerships and retail outlets. All this required training, says Vasudeva.But the shovel work is paying off. Vasudeva’s drive for a countrywide push for change has worked wonders for HPCL. At the end of the latest phase of the project, the controller-led solution was being run on 1,682 out of HPCL’s 8,500 dealerships. Today those dealerships, which form only 19 percent of HPCL’s retailers, bring in 65 percent of the company’s sales volume.
The retail automation system not only assures quality, quantity but service to the end customer, too. It offers the convenience of various modes of payment. For dealers, it ensures better inventory control and enhanced customer value. For HPCL, the system provides transparency and control of all facets of retail outlet operations.
“Linking up all the individual retail processes on a platform has been our strength,” Vasudeva says. “Others may have automated on a standalone basis. Getting it all together and integrated seamlessly into the ERP system makes the whole process integrated, and this is all done with the customer in mind.”
The Person Behind It
“The idea was to impart efficiency to our retail customer and ultimately build trust on both the quality and quantity fronts,”
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