Que: Kindly brief Energetica India readers about BPCL’s digital transformation journey and what were the challenges faced by the company during this journey?

Ans: Today, digital transformation in energy sector is progressing at an unprecedented speed and it is driven by smart and connected technologies.. For an energy company like BPCL, it was vital that we also evolve and move fast in our digital transformation journey. We broadly thought to work in two areas, One on the customer-facing side, where we try to make the life of our customers easy and seamless for meeting any of their energy requirements. Second is the internal-facing side, to be ready to be able to deliver the promise to the customer.

Crafted with an idea to create an exceptional and consistent experience for the customers, technology has played a pivotal role in delivering our vision through key partnerships with technology providers and employment of path breaking technologies. The journey involved stages beginning with understanding the complexity and depth of technologies like cloud, SaaS, AI, NLP, IoT. Further, identification the right set of technologies and its applications, followed with partnership with technology providers was vital. BPCL is first among the PSUs to adopt could technology and the idea stems from building a resilient technology platform where all applications / systems both internal and customer facing are hosted on the cloud. For a digital transformation journey to succeed, it is essential to bring all stakeholders on board.

BPCL, being an integrated oil and energy company, has multiple businesses spanning across wide portfolio of products. Thus, next series of steps were focused on understanding the business requirements and key use cases. Challenges in taking up the digital transformation journey & scaling remains universal. Integrating the new developments & technologies with the current systems and connecting the dots across the widespread system were one of key challenges. Other challenges were development of functionalities coupled with easy-to-use interface designs, upscaling the performance of the platforms, improved security system for garnering customers’ trust for seamless transactions, continuous re-engineering of platforms and systems to exceed customer’s evolving expectations.

We started our journey around 2019 and then COVID-19 started. Nonetheless, despite all these challenges, today, I'm happy to say that we have made good progress as far as the digital landscape is concerned and substantial progress has been made for both, in customer-facing and internal-facing technology processes. We are trying to deliver a superior customer experience using technology.

Que: What is project Anubhav? Please explain.

Ans: Project Anubhav is abold step by BPCL management and the whole idea is to deliver an exceptional and consistent customer experience across the value chain. Today, customer expectations are changing in the digital era. Companies like Amazon or Netflix have made the life of customers very easy. Similarly, when we started this journey, we had a couple of objectives for this particular initiative. One was, how can we have a single view of all our customers with regard to the BPCL energy basket? Along with that, how can we give single view of BPCL to all my customers? For example, if a customer is fueling their vehicle, he/she may have requirements regarding LPG or lubricants, etc. So we need to have technology platform that the customer can straightaway access and get the details on products that they require. Along with that, at the backend side, we want a safe, secure, and efficient operations across the country that include number of LPG plants and fuel stations.. Last but not the least, we needed to upgrade the technology piece for even our workforce because the field force are dealing not only with the customers but also with channel partners. So how do we make them digital savvy so that they become smarter in terms of interactions with the customer as well as the channel partners to meet all the requirements?

So with this background, Project Anubhav evolved and the project team was formed to look into both B2B and B2C requirements. And as a starting point, we had a lot of deliberations with various stakeholders. We decided that we will go for the cloud first approach and BPCL is among one of the first PSUs to opt for the cloud technology. On this cloud, we decided that we will host all our applications catering to the various customer requirements. The broad framework was that we need to have certain foundation pillars based on which we would move ahead. So, Trust, Convenience, and Personalization were the pillars based on which we combined all our technology stacks to give comfort and superior experience to our customers. Today, we have a unified and integrated app and website called ‘Hello BPCL’. This is for all our B2B and B2C customers supported by a chatbot called Urja, a virtual messaging platform, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and it is unifying all customer interactions to a consistent omnichannel platform. We have also launched something very unique “UFill”, an apples, touchlessfueling solution and when the customer comes to any of the BPCL outlets, the machine gets preset with that quantity scanned on UFill and hence, there is no human intervention. The customers are assured that they are getting the particular fuelling requirements that they have paid. In lubricants, we have done something very unique and I think it may be the first time in the country. We've launched a QR solution wherein BPCL can track and trace the product which we are manufacturing in various geographies and markets. With this, the company is able to tell them that this product is genuine. And secondly, business is able to see how the product is moving across different geographies. Most importantly, the mechanics who, are the influencers in the lubricant market are offered schemes like cash coupons to recommend certain products to the customer. Today, through the solution, we are giving them an instant redemption of the cash coupons which used to earlier take a lot of time and hence, we have reimagined the entire landscape for lubricants. Last but not the least, BPCL’s Digital Nerve Center - IRIS, we have integrated all our Retail outlets, all our Terminal locations, and our LPG plants under one unified platform. Every day the price is changing at a retail outlet. Through this technology piece, we are able to ensure what prices have changed at all the retail outlets and if the new price does not get populated for a particular nozzle, then that particular nozzle that dispenses fuel will get locked till the correct price gets populated. So we have ensured the trust to the customers, anytime every time.

Que: How is Salesforce helping BPCL?

Ans: Salesforce is a CRM solution that we call as Salesbuddy. It is helping us with the sales solution and being actively used by every field officer. It helps in the lead generation and post working on them converting them into opportunities apart from interactions with channel partners. So field officer is able to do a host of activities including competition analysis - trends in different markets, geographies, and what the concerned Sales staff need to do to improve sales. Salesforce is helping on that task management. As far as the Service Cloud is concerned, whatever issues or complaints were there, we are able to see the kind of issues that are coming and how we can resolve them.

Que: BPCL is also transitioning towards renewables. Shed some light on BPCL’s renewable energy portfolio.

Ans: BPCL is definitely on a path to increasing its green energy portfolio. There's a huge buzz as far as climate change is considered. Currently, we have invested in renewable capacities of around 45 megawatts (MW), and out of this the major portfolio comes from solar and we are also increasing our hydro and biomass, apart from wind energy. We are also working aggressively towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and have been able to reduce approximately 190 TMT CO2. We have plans to expand further concerning natural gas and other renewables.

Que: What are the plans of the company for the renewable energy sector?

Ans: India has targeted to achieve net-zero by 2070 and in line with that BPCL has taken the lead as the company has already set a roadmap to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. To do so, we are spending a considerable amount of money to build a renewable energy portfolio. On an immediate basis, we plan to set up 1 MW green energy capacity, which is primarily going to be solar. We are increasing the 43 MW to 1 GW and in the long run, we plan to ramp it up to 10 GW.

Que: Is there any specific time period for this?

Ans: To achieve this 1 GW, we aim to do it by 2025 and by 2040 we want to scale it up to 10 GW. We are also working on ethanol blending. Besides, we are also aggressively increasing our electric vehicle (EV) footprint. We have plans to set up around 7,000 energy stations which will be dispensing petrol, diesel, CNG, as well as electric and hydrogen options. Thus, we are putting in R&D efforts for biofuels, renewable, green hydrogen, and EVs.

Que: Do you have some tie-ups in the renewable energy sector for different segments?

Ans: BPCL has joined forces with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) to scale up Alkaline Electrolyser technology for Green Hydrogen production and commercialization. We have also signed an MoU with the government of Uttarakhand for the development of renewable energy in the state. We also have a partnership with MG Motor for setting up EV charging stations. We are also actively working in other areas to increase the renewable energy portfolio.

Que: Can you explain more about the partnership with MG Motor?

Ans: : The idea is to ensure infra for all our customers who are enthused to buy EV vehicles. The construct is the setting up of EV charging stations at BPCL retail outlets across the country. Even before that, we set up the first EV charging corridor along Chennai-Tiruchi-Madurai, which is a 900 km stretch, under which we have set up charging stations every 100 km. We want to spread it out in terms of different highways and geographies also. In that context, we have tied up with MG Motor and this will help us in achieving the goal of setting up those 7000 energy stations that I mentioned previously. We will also be coming out with a host of customer amenities in terms of hygienic washrooms, food courts etc. We’ll have a whole ecosystem apart from the EV charging options available there so that when the customer is charging the vehicle they can meet other requirements as well.

Que: Is there any investment criteria in terms of how much BPCL is going to invest in the coming years in renewables?

Ans: Solar is one big piece that we are going to do. We are also working on biofuels and EVs. BPCL plans to spend around Rs 25,000 crores in building renewable energy capacity and we're committed to spending more going forward.

Que: What is the time period of this investment?

Ans: Like I mentioned, we plan to be net zero by 2040. In terms of setting up the infra, we have different time periods.

Que: What are the other steps taken towards reducing carbon footprints?

Ans: These steps will help us achieve net-zero by 2040. As I mentioned ethanol blending previously, and 10% is already achieved. Going ahead, with the vision of the government, we plan to take it up to 20%. Additionally, with regard to EV charging stations at 7,000 retail outlets. We also have plans to roll out 5000 Compressed Bio Gas (CBG) plants by 2023-24, which will produce 15 million tonnes of CBG. There’ll be a good basket of renewable energy available, going ahead.

Que: Can you shed some light on the R&D segment of BPCL?

Ans: Today, all technologies are costly when we talk about renewable energy. In terms of different technologies, we are talking about green hydrogen power. They are through our tie-ups and our R&D is also working with them to see how we can scale up this activity wherein we can reduce our total carbon footprint. Additionally, with different tie-ups, we can scale up the carbon capture utilization and storage work in this particular area as well.