HPCL and the Project Blitz: Evangelizing Buisness Intelligence

Abstract

HPCL is one of the large oil and gas companies in India that started their digital journey with the introduction of the ERP system in 2003. Once the transaction data stabilized into their ERP system, the top management at HPCL wanted to extract intelligence from that pool of data and use that for informed decision making. Subsequently the implementation of business intelligence (BI) started at HPCL from 2010. But after the BI system was rolled out to the business users, multiple challenges surfaced. These ranged from technical issues to functional deficiencies in the system that slowed down user adoption. As per directive from the top management, the internal IT team of HPCL took charge of the BI system and initiated a massive overhauling exercise. The target in front of the IT team was not only to revamp the product but also to evangelize it to the user community. During the period of 2013 to 2016 the IT team under the guidance of Mr. R. Radhakrishnan, Executive Director, Information Systems (Functional) followed a planned approach in fixing technical issues in the system, aligning the functionalities to the actual user needs and engaging the users in multiple evangelization drives to make BI a success story at HPCL. The result was phenomenal as the IT team was able to show the value of the BI system to the organization and was able to get necessary user traction in making BI popular at HPCL. However, with new technological advancements of the BI system and enhanced expectation of the business users from the system the IT team needed to relook into the possible ways to keep the BI system relevant for current business scenarios.