Digital Dividends: BPCL champions change with Project Anubhav

In terms of digital transformation, the last few years have been dramatic. The Indian market has tremendous digital development possibilities, and both the public and the commercial sectors are equally committed to the project. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL), a Fortune 500 firm, is one such participant, with a robust network of around 19,000 retail outlets across India. BPCL is the second largest Indian oil marketing company and one of the premier integrated energy companies.

“Technology is playing a pivotal role in BPCL’s digital transformation journey. The developing technologies from some of the leading cloud providers will also have a significant impact on the future of the oil and gas industry in the Indian market,” said Rahul Tandon, head, Digital Transformation (Project Anubhav), BPCL.

To foster digital change throughout its marketing division, BPCL has initiated its Project Anubhav, with the aim to provide a unified BPCL experience across different touchpoints to its enormous retail (B2C) and commercial (B2B) client base. The initiative bolsters BPCL’s marketing activities and gives it a single perspective on the consumer, with the goal of improving business process efficiency, improving supply-chain transparency, and gathering market information. The key initiatives launched as part of the project are:

SalesBuddy, a CRM application to develop and maintain client relationships;

IRIS, the Digital Nerve Centre, it enhances supply chain transparency and assists in delivering on BPCL’s brand commitments;

Urja, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that can communicate in 13 languages;

HelloBPCL, a unified and integrated software that provides a single window view of BPCL. It is also a one-stop solution for BPCL’s sales and service activities.

Consumer-centricity is one of the initiative’s main focuses, and BPCL has teamed up with Oracle for its pilot digital marketing programme project to improve customer interactions through digital channels and to cross-sell fuel to its LPG customers.

“Customers today seek solutions that are simple to use, intuitive, multichannel, and tailored in real-time, and they prioritise seamless work delivery across many channels. These business objectives have been successfully met through our digital pilot with Oracle,” said Tandon. On the response on digital marketing by using Oracle Marketing Cloud – Responsys, he added, “We have received positive feedback on this, so we’re planning to develop a data lake, and on that data lake, whatever analytics or analytics centre of excellence performs, we will be constructing multiple-use cases that we may deploy further.”

BPCL hopes to have a thorough grasp of digital marketing platforms and how these may improve customer experience through end-to-end digital marketing customer journeys as part of this project. Analytics on BPCL’s data is used to create business knowledge for simpler decision-making. “Analytics and artificial intelligence are also playing a pivotal role in boosting customer satisfaction. Parallelly, digital marketing enabled cloud solutions such as Oracle Responsys have helped BPCL boost customer engagement through data-driven choices and improve our revenue streams,” he added.

“By developing this distinct edge for itself and its stakeholders, BPCL is reaping the rewards. A project of this magnitude needs vision emphasis to become a digital-first company. We live in a digitally linked world, and technology is pushing changes in business models ,” said Rakesh Jaitly, senior sales director, Oracle Applications.

BPCL’s Tandon added that the public sector petroleum marketing company has made a strategic decision to prioritise cloud and software-as-a-service solutions. It has created an innovative fuelling solution, a cloud-first software that is more secure, quick, and simple to use. This has been quite popular with a large number of customers utilising this solution. These developing technologies will be game-changers for the industry in the near future.