MOTOR OIL
DIGITAL REPORT 2021
How COVID-19 has Driven Motor Oil’s Digital Transformation
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
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How COVID-19 has Driven Motor Oil’s Digital Transformation www. m oh . g r
MOTOR OIL
Nick Giannakakis, Group CIO at Greece’s Motor Oil, discusses accelerating digital strategy, digitising manufacturing processes and the customer experience
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n the months since the Covid-19 pandemic began, numerous industries have reported a fast acceleration in terms of
moving to digital processes. This certainly rings true for Motor Oil, an oil refinery based in Greece 04
that is one of the largest in Europe. “In the last two months we’ve seen two years’ worth of acceleration,” its Group Chief Information Officer Nick Giannakakis says. It has also been a complex endeavour, as Giannakakis describes the company as “one of the biggest, most complex manufacturing refineries in Europe”. Motor Oil has a strong export branch, with 78% of its operations coming from export sales that need to be facilitated via loading ports and vehicles. As well as being an oil refinery they have a large retail operation, with hundreds of petrol stations selling non-fuel products as well as petrol, making up a large part of the business. A key aspect of the acceleration caused by COVID was ensuring employees could continue
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MOTOR OIL
“ In the last two months we’ve seen two years’ worth of acceleration” — Nick Giannakakis, Chief Information Officer, Motor Oil
decided to not stop any of its investments in technology, which meant much of its digital programme could
to perform their daily duties remotely.
continue and it also ensured a good,
“We had to address the end user com-
continued relationship with their part-
puter experience for staff, to make sure
ners. That also meant it didn’t have to
they could still work collaboratively
delay its digital transformation.
from home and get the best possible performance,” Giannakakis says. 06
While the pandemic of course brought challenges, Motor Oil
Giannakakis is a believer in resilience in the face of adversity. To handle the challenges of COVID to the business, he says Motor Oil
E X E C U T I V E P R O FILE :
Nick Giannakakis Title: CIO
Company: Motor Oil
Industry: Oil & Energy
Nick Giannakakis has over 20 years of experience working in IT. Throughout his career he’s worked for Richemont in Switzerland, British American Tobacco in the UK, and in his native Greece for the Coca-Cola Hellenic Company. His current role is at Motor Oil, where he’s based in Athens. He describes his style of management as being both a mentor and a team member, commenting that he prides himself on a daily basis of being able to combine these two aspects. He believes in the importance of being able to influence decisions working with senior executives. He’s also a big believer in diversity. “We try to encourage everyone to bring a difference to everything they do,” he says. “When you are leading a tech department, and I have been on this journey for years and years now, you need to be able to focus on diversity. When I say diversity I also mean in the way of thinking, combining a more agile way of thinking and understanding the power of prioritisation.” Giannakakis is collaborative, always a team player, and always keen to learn. “I don’t want to be left behind in this new reality, and I always try to bring new ideas to the table” he adds. www. m oh . g r
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ABOUT OTE GROUP OTE Group is the largest technology company in Greece and a member of Deutsche Telekom AG. It is one of the top three listed companies, with respect to capitalization, in the Athens Stock Exchange and is also listed in the London Stock Exchange. OTE Group offers a wide range of services, under the unif ied brand COSMOTE: f ixed and mobile telephony, broadband services, pay-TV and ICT solutions. In addition, the Group in Greece is also involved in maritime communications and real estate.
In the f ield of System Integration, OTE Group has developed diverse capabilities and constitutes a leading partner of choice for businesses seeking innovative solutions in the f ields of Data Centers, Cloud, Information Security, Networking, Big Data and IoT. Leveraging strategic partnerships with IT market leaders and thanks to its large IT & Network workforce, it has delivered large scale and complex ICT projects, offering managed services to customers in Europe.
WE EMPOWER. YOU LEAD Focusing on continuously developing innovative solutions and building strategic partnerships with global IT leaders, OTE Group stands out to be a trusted technology partner for large business customers. By modernizing its IT infrastructure, as well as maintaining operational and people excellence, OTE Group delivers and supports sophisticated tailor-made projects. The state-of-the-art services and solutions offered by OTE Group enable businesses dynamically to the new digital era and ensure their business continuity and efficiency. The strategic partnership with Motor Oil for the implementation of an SDWAN (Software Defined-WAN) solution acts as an accelerator of the company’s digital transformation journey through a robust technology strategy. Motor Oil is one of the leading players in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean region in the areas of crude oil refining and petroleum products. The company has large campuses all over Greece with distinct connectivity and communication needs. Some of the installations are in remote areas, where as others need to operate uninterrupted 24/7. At the same time, these installations need to have independent and safe access to the Internet and to cloud services, with an extremely high SLA, regarding both network and services as well as applications. OTE has provided Motor Oil with a turn-key solution to modernize its corporate network with a Software
www.cosmote.gr
Defined-WAN implementation. The SD-WAN solution provides a virtual WAN architecture, with users controlling and managing the entire system via software running on a central platform. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it can offer a combination of communication technologies (MPLS, dedicated broadband Internet and LTE), to safely interconnect a company’s point of presence, while improving overall user experience and increasing productivity. The Motor Oil project includes 30 sites all over Greece. OTE Group has selected Cisco Meraki SD-WAN services in order to provide Motor Oil a complete solution that includes the necessary connectivity, hardware equipment, a management platform and all the SLA agreements needed. With the implementation of the SD-WAN project, Motor Oil will have achieved a simplified, fully secured network, with high availability and scalability. Both user experience and productivity will have improved. The company’s IT department has now more agility, being able to integrate new points of presence whenever needed and much faster. Also, the project provides better management of capital, as well as operational expenses.
Holistically looking at Motor Oil operations, OTE Group aims to empower our customer’s vision for having a leading role in the crude oil ref ining and marketing of petroleum products sectors in Greece. www. m oh . g r
MOTOR OIL
showed great resilience. They demonstrated this by creating new solutions. “At the peak of the crisis we developed a digital planning tool that allows our employees to perform their daily business,” says Giannakakis. “When you have an organisation that needs to communicate by making hundreds of calls on a daily basis and do their jobs from home, having the same quality in terms of communication is a very important aspect.” For the retail side of the business 10
the company used advanced analytics to deep dive into sales models, identifying relevant models that could predict future sales. This helped them develop solutions to scale up, such as a new pay at pump service which eliminates the need for customers to step inside a shop to pay. Another change he has seen is the way the customer experience is framed. “Some say we’re living in the age of the customer, but I think we are beyond that,” he says. “Before COVID we were in the age of the platform, and COVID has brought the necessity of this platform because of the importance of having collaborative activities.
“ It’s an industry that needs to change and with COVID this has been magnified and accelerated” — Nick Giannakakis, Chief Information Officer, Motor Oil
“Customer interactions through
In terms of manufacturing, Motor
these platforms continue to be at the
Oil developed the concept of a smart
top of our priorities. We have seen
factory. Giannakakis explains this is
changes, and with a change in focus
focused on five pillars: digital engi-
sales have significantly increased, and
neering; digital production, where the
we want to be able to react to that cus-
remote operation centre is the north
tomer experience. I would say that now
star; digital asset management; digital
customer-centricity along with data is
workers and equipping them with the
the new priority for our business.”
relevant tools so they can perform their tasks; and the digital optimisation of processes. “Everything to do with the smart factory is classified in those five pillars,” he says. “With the help of our partner ecosystem working in each of these pillars allowed us to achieve increased production, reduced downtime, reduced production cost, and focus on product optimisation.” Giannakakis says that although COVID-19 has certainly accelerated all these processes, the need to do this already existed. “The challenges in the energy and oil and gas industries were already there. It’s an industry that needs to change and with COVID this has been magnified and accelerated,” says Giannakakis. “At the same time you have two frontiers: you have to keep the www. m oh . g r
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1970
Year founded
5,000 Number of employees
business going with the new reality,
good for us to be able to go with a swift
while not losing time regarding the
pilot to learn and have a partner at
digital transformation.”
the same time ready to scale it up. We
Strong partnerships have been vital
need to be able to combine the value
for this. “I’ve always been a big believer
offering from International and Local
in having relevant partner ecosystems,”
partners in order to be able to maxi-
he says. “Companies like ours, who are
mize the impact.”
manufacturing and retail companies,
From the International field SAP is
cannot focus on technology ourselves,
an important partner for Motor Oil.
because it’s not part of our mandate.
“They help us with all of our transac-
We need to have a partner ecosystem
tions, whether it’s on the customer
around us to help us scale up and pro-
side or the manufacturing side. Every
vide us with the relevant innovation in
inventory and every shipment lives in
the areas and the priorities that we set.
SAP, so it’s a no-brainer for us to look
It’s exactly what we have done both
to SAP to also help us innovate.”
before and during the crisis.”
One of the largest local players
He explains that having partners in
is OTE. OTE has provided Motor Oil
various sectors help them to have the
with a turn-key solution to modernise
right focus and pilot new systems. “It’s
its corporate network with a Software www. m oh . g r
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Get reliable network coverage and security protection, fast. A modern network must be able to respond easily, quickly and flexibly to the growing needs of today’s digital business. Must provide visibility & control of applications, users and devices on and off the network and Intelligently direct traffic across the WAN. Be scalable and automate the process to provide new innovative services. Support IoT devices and utilize state-of-the-art technologies such as real-time analytics, ML and AI. And all these must be provided with maximum security and minimum cost. This is the power that brings the integration of two cloud managed platforms, Cisco Meraki and Cisco Umbrella. This integration is binding together the best of breed in cloud-managed networking and Security.
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“ Whatever is good for the environment is good for the business too” — Nick Giannakakis, Chief Information Officer, Motor Oil
Defined-WAN implementation. The
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“I think we are going to live in a new
SD-WAN solution provides a virtual WAN
reality where our priorities and our digital
architecture, with users controlling and
transformation will be accelerated, but
managing the entire system via software
also I think the traditional model was
running on a central platform.
always focused on two pillars: innovation
With the implementation of the
of the business model, and the opera-
SD-WAN project, Motor Oil will have
tional side,” concludes Giannakakis.
achieved a simplified, fully secured net-
“Now we’ve added sustainability into the
work, with high availability and scalability
mix too. It’s a strong directive from the
to improve both the user experience
European Union but also from across
and productivity.
the sector. Whatever is good for the envi-
Looking ahead, Giannakakis believes
ronment is good for the business too.”
the major oil players will all adapt to new ways of working post-COVID. www. m oh . g r
MOTOR OIL 12A IRODOU ATTIKOU STREET 151 24 MAROUSSI, GREECE T +30 210 8094000 www.moh.gr
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