Oracle Customer Success—ADNOC Distribution

Abu Dhabi National Oil Company Distribution (ADNOC Distribution) is a United Arab Emirates (UAE) government-owned company that specializes in marketing and distributing petroleum products in the region. Established in 1973, ADNOC Distribution is one of the largest and fastest growing petroleum distribution companies in the Persian Gulf, currently operating more than 350 petrol stations, 15 vehicle inspection stations, and a vast network of convenience stores across the country. The company runs one of the busiest online transaction processing (OLTP) systems in the Gulf region, with more than 30 million transactions each month.

Responding to growing demand for oil and petroleum products such as fuel, diesel, lubricants, and related services like car washes and retail stores at petrol stations—ADNOC Distribution continues to rapidly expand its services in the region. The organization’s domestic business is growing at a staggering annual rate of 10% to 15%, and its petrol stations are on track to double to 500 million transactions by the end of 2016. ADNOC Distribution’s IT division is constantly challenged with improving business processes and adding desired business functionality while managing rapidly growing data volumes and containing total cost of ownership (TCO).

Foreseeing the growing demand for oil and gas products, and the profound changes in customer behavior—such as increased use of mobile devices and demand for more personalized services—ADNOC Distribution, beginning in 2010, initiated an eight-year roadmap to respond to these challenges by deploying Oracle’s technology and applications across all business functions. The company upgraded its Oracle database environments to the latest release that same year, and in 2012 deployed Oracle Exadata Database Machine. This implementation reduced database licensing costs by 40%, allowed database instance provisioning in minutes versus weeks, decreased performance bottlenecks by 90%, shortened billing processes by 95%, and increased performance of sales systems by 15x and supply chain systems by 60x.

“After concluding the first two phases of our roadmap, system performance exceeded even the highest expectations, nut this was only the beginning of our journey to achieve full IT transformation on an integrated Oracle stack,” said Awad Ahmed Ali El-Sidiq, senior database administrator, ADNOC Distribution.

As the third major step of its IT transformation roadmap, ADNOC Distribution established a single shared services platform—unifying diverse enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications by upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4 on engineered systems. The organization deployed Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud as a centralized platform for running 40 Oracle E-Business Suite modules in a virtualized stack, using Oracle Exadata Database Machine as the primary database engine.

Professional users now work on a single integrated business application for critical shared services, which forms the backbone of ADNOC Distribution’s operations by supporting ERP, OLTP, and business intelligence applications. The deployment substantially increased employee productivity and back-office efficiency, while improving service quality in petrol stations and convenience stores for higher customer satisfaction. At the same time, the organization reduced TCO—from its hardware and software footprint to the IT support costs for maintaining heterogeneous shared services applications.

“Creating a single shared services platform was a key milestone in our IT transformation roadmap. Shared services efficiency is critical for our success because it increases back-office productivity and improves service quality across all business divisions. At the same time, it frees IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives such as enabling employee mobility, streamlining user lifecycle management, staff onboarding, and personalizing customer and employee relationships and experiences,” Abdul Nazir – ERP Project Manager

A Single Integrated Application for Critical Shared Services

Before the upgrade, ADNOC Distribution depended on IBM Maximo, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, and in-house-developed legacy applications for performing shared services functions. In view of the company’s steady growth and increased customer and employee expectations, shared services needed to be unified on a single system to improve user efficiency and provide both customers and employees with an enhanced experience.

With the upgrade, ADNOC Distribution extended its Oracle E-Business Suite footprint to 40 modules covering all ERP functions—including human resources (HR) and learning management, finance and payroll, procurement and order management, inventory and enterprise asset management, and sales and customer services. The application is designed to support 3,000 concurrent users, who process critical shared services across the organization. The company replaced IBM Maximo Purchasing with Oracle Advanced Procurement to create purchase requisitions and work orders much faster, as users no longer need to switch between applications. Maintenance activities, including tracking of all jobs, are now realized with Oracle Enterprise Asset Management instead of IBM Maximo Maintenance, making it easier to allocate technicians for maintenance work orders, to track and report maintenance jobs, and to settle finances—all within Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4.

Shared services users now have access to out-of-the-box business intelligence (BI) for all Oracle E-Business Suite modules, providing better operational visibility and enhanced reporting capabilities to significantly simplify and improve decisions across the board.

“Our IT team can now focus on advancing our technology and applications roadmap, because Oracle E-Business Suite offers a full set of modules that are seamlessly integrated by design, and has inbuilt business intelligence capabilities, so we use the suite’s standardized features and customize only for isolated use cases,” El-Sidiq said.

All Critical Business Functions Supported by Engineered Systems

Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4 on Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ADNOC Distribution consolidated and virtualized all critical business functions on Oracle’s Engineered Systems. When deploying Oracle Exadata as the organization’s primary database engine, the company experienced 20x performance improvements on legacy applications, while the Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade on Oracle Exalogic delivered a threefold increase in application performance. More importantly, shared services professionals now perform tasks in far fewer steps by working on a single application. For example, to create a maintenance job and realize a partial advance payment to the supplier, the user now works exclusively in Oracle E-Business Suite for both activities.

“With all critical business functions covered by a single application running on a virtualized high performance stack, users enjoy a state-of-the-art solution. Consequently, employee efficiency is increasing,” Ahmed Al-Dhaheri – application systems department manager said. “We rely only on two onsite Oracle platforms for our entire critical business—everything is consolidated and virtualized on Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, enabling us to continue reducing power and cooling requirements. We moved less critical shared services applications to Oracle’s cloud, where for example we currently run talent management and appraisal processes for 2,500 employees with Oracle Talent Management Cloud Service.”

ADNOC Distribution also uses Oracle Exadata as the foundation for a Database-as-a-Service solution. The company provisions new databases in just a few minutes by using standard templates for OLTP, data warehouse, storage configuration, and security parameter settings. With the upgraded platform, ADNOC Distribution’s IT team can now clone environments three times faster than before. This helps developers create and test new services much quicker and shortens time to market, for example for prepaid re-fueling services or introducing fuel ordering by phone.

Introducing Employee Mobility with a Simplified User Interface

A major reason for ADNOC Distribution to choose Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4 for all mission-critical business functions was the simplified user interface, which Oracle introduced for the latest E-Business Suite release.

“The user interface was highly important to us, because it is key for achieving employee satisfaction and outstanding productivity. It is very attractive and gives users the feel of mobile applications—the Fusion look,” El-Sidiq said. “Any employee who uses a self-service application, for example when requesting leave, will be given access to the simplified user interface. By providing users with the experience of mobile applications in their operational environment, we pave the way for rolling out Oracle Fusion Middleware very soon.”

Increasing employee productivity and customer satisfaction with the products and services provided enables ADNOC Distribution to constantly capture market share and drive revenue, anticipating expansion of its network of petrol stations from 350 to more than 500 stations by 2017.

Leveraging Platform Investment for Business Continuity

As an immediate next step, ADNOC Distribution will create a disaster recovery site with the same system setup—Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud as a centralized shared services platform and Oracle Exadata Database Machine as the primary database engine. Critical shared services will be available 24/7 using Oracle Active Data Guard and Oracle GoldenGate replication, ensuring 100% business continuity. Even in the event of a power outage or business shutdown, users will enjoy a high level of service using the disaster recovery infrastructure without noticing any disruption.

“With 350 million financial transactions annually, ADNOC Distribution cannot afford even a minute’s downtime. The IT division is tasked with ensuring round-the-clock uptime to meet service level agreements, and with Oracle’s high availability infrastructure and premium support services, we are providing 24/7 services across the country,” said Ali Abdul Aziz, vice president IT, ADNOC Distribution.

Future Integration Made Easy

By running Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4 on Oracle’s engineered systems, ADNOC Distribution greatly facilitates future integrations across its complex application landscape—scheduling for example the introduction of an “ADNOC New Smart Project Initiative” system within three months. Each customer with an RFID tagged vehicle, scheduled to be launched for all UAE registered cars by OCT2016, will be automatically recognized at the petrol station, and payment for the delivered services will be deducted using different payment methods as customer’s smart card “ADNOC Plus” or National ID or radio-frequency identification (RFID). The profiling data—time and date of customer visit, products and services purchased, and payments realized—are automatically captured and integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite. This will support significant retail business volume in the company’s convenience stores by better understanding customer behavior and offering products and services related to customer buying habits.

“Each newly deployed application ties back into the latest Oracle E-Business Suite version, which means that for the next couple of years we do not need to worry about compatibility, support of older versions, system performance, or desired functionality. We invest once in the right shared services solution, we complete the work once, and the investment pays back within a year or two,” El-Sidiq said.

Establishing the Foundation for Oracle Fusion Middleware

From March 2016 onwards, ADNOC Distribution will start the deployment Plan for Oracle Fusion Middleware to enable full employee mobility. Shared services professionals will be able to use all functionalities of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4 on mobile devices—such as entering purchase requisitions and approving supplier payments, applying for leave or requesting relocation, or checking an applicant’s resume and confirming a job interview. With managers and executives frequently traveling, the company will further increase staff efficiency and avoid any delay in business processes.

“Wherever executives are travelling, they will be able to work from smart devices. To prepare for this important change, we are currently leveraging Oracle E-Business Suite’s simplified user interface and mobile capabilities, where we introduced a first set of features for mobile devices such as approving employee requests,” Abdul Nazir – ERP project manager said.

The Oracle Fusion Middleware deployment will also include identity management, single sign-on, document management, website portals and content management, and service-oriented architecture within the Oracle Fusion Governance, Risk, and Compliance framework—all running on Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic and integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.4—so that information can be accessed on smartphones and tablets.

“Oracle Fusion Middleware is an important extension for the completion of our journey. We have already designed the architecture for the system, again leveraging the same Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic infrastructure, and have now unified our shared services with Oracle E-Business Suite. Soon we will plug in Oracle Fusion Middleware to automate the entire user lifecycle for 13,000 employees, and facilitate the creation of compelling websites. Both our employees and our customers will enjoy exceptionally fast and user-friendly applications,” El-Sidiq said.