Petron Corp., the country’s largest oil refiner and distributor, has implemented Anaplan’s cloud-based business planning and execution solution for its sales and demand forecasting.
Petron’s refinery processes crude oil into a full range of petroleum products, including LPG, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, kerosene, industrial fuel oil, solvents, asphalts and mixed xylene. The company’s income reached Php3 billion in the first half of 2014 as sales volumes grew by 8 percent.
Oil and gas consumption in the Philippines is expected to rise on the back of economic growth, and the government’s promotion of gas use, thus it is important for oil refining companies such as Petron to make use of technologies that could help them accurately forecast and meet demand.
Oil and gas consumption in the Philippines is expected to rise on the back of economic growth, and the government’s promotion of gas use, thus it is important for oil refining companies such as Petron to make use of technologies that could help them accurately forecast and meet demand. IMAGE CREDIT: PETRON
Petron previously collated numerous spreadsheets manually in a seven-level approval process across 200 planners. The complexity of the process often compromised the business needs for faster decisions. This issue triggered Petron’s journey to the cloud.
Petron initially embarked on the Anaplan Challenge, where Anaplan will build a prototype in a matter of days, with no cost to the customer. Anaplan’s team built their applications in a couple of days, complete with fully functional sample processes and reports.
The company’s National Sales Planning team, which ensures the success of retail dealerships, replaced a system of complex, spreadsheet-based forecasting models with Anaplan’s cloud-based, in-memory platform to ensure an agile, streamlined demand planning process.
Since the Anaplan system is cloud-based, it took only six weeks to deploy the system and Petron could fully leverage a powerful platform to perform more timely and accurate forecasting.
“No IT personnel were involved from Petron’s side. The Anaplan team trained Petron’s business users to navigate the platform in two days. Without technical assistance from IT-trained staff, Petron’s business users were able to manage the Anaplan platform and change business rules as well as advanced planning models on the fly,” Samir Neji, Managing Director, Anaplan Asia, told UpgradeMag.com in an e-mail interview.
Anaplan’s cloud-based platform is built on the patented, in-memory HyperBlock data engine. Anaplan unifies data from across the organization in a secure cloud/SaaS platform and interconnects plans to deliver unprecedented trust and visibility into the planning process.
Anaplan is fully supported from any mobile device (iOS, Android, Windows) as well as major desktop operating systems like Windows and Mac OS, thus,Anaplan users never have to be disconnected from their data regardless of device.
“Petron’s decision to implement Anaplan is proof that successful and innovative companies in Asia are searching for more powerful business planning and execution tools,” saidNeji. “With the power of Anaplan, we are confident Petron will continue to stay ahead of critical business events, rapidly model potential impacts and course correct on the fly.”
Petron captures nearly 40 percent of the total market and a retail network of over 2,200 service stations – larger than two of its closest competitors combined.
Tipping point
“This year will be a global tipping point for cloud-first strategy across all sectors, and the Philippines is no exception. Organizations in the Philippines are looking to adopt cloud technologies to benefit from a more agile and affordable way of working,” said Neji.
Neji reveals that companies are concerned about lack of visibility into workforce dynamics and associated costs, lack of confidence in budgets and plans from the finance side.
Sales departments on the other hand are typically challenged by difficulty to accurately map alignment between products, territories and compensation and inability to update plans on the fly for complex variables, disruption and uncertainty.
“Businesses in general also come to us to solve significant deviations from annual plans resulting in missed numbers and non-prioritized spending.
“Ultimately, they want to gain deeper insight into the relationships between the critical variables of the overall sales plan—quota, territory, compensation, capacity, sales team tenure, sales team performance, in order to be a strategic partner to the business,” said Neji.
