Shell leads with two major awards at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2022

It received awards under the Digital and Automation categories for the energy industry.

With years of expertise in the energy sector, Shell’s operations in Malaysia are equipped to continue leading the industry with its latest innovations.

Shell Business Service Centre Sdn Bhd was given two major awards in the recently concluded Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards hosted by Singapore Business Review.

The annual awards programme recognises exceptional companies who are riding the disruption wave and are leading the technological revolution and digital journeys of their respective industries to boost Malaysia’s fast-growing economy.

The first it received was the Digital – Energy award for its efforts in doubling the speed of retail station opening through digital.

Shell earlier identified that speed is a key factor in ensuring business success but opening a retail station in Malaysia often involves a long process with more than ten parties from the organisation, dealer, and external vendors.

This often resulted in misalignment in the process and has caused missed opportunities due to delays in station or site opening.

With this, Customer Operations in Shell realised the need for close collaboration and has taken a bold step forward to gather all relevant parties virtually involved in the station opening process to establish a robust process framework.

The company mapped out the end-to-end processes through multiple workshops and discussions, to streamline and simplify processes and ensure sustainability with the Lean Six Sigma methodology.

It has also developed a new digital tracking tool called the AutoGate, a simple tool that ensures the real-time progress update of station opening to all stakeholders and speeds up all approval processes for controls and compliances.

The transparency introduced by the tool has enabled respective stakeholders to be more responsive and react faster to changes and risks. 

The efficiency has resulted in accelerating the opening of numerous retail stations in Malaysia by an average of three months earlier than before and accelerate revenue derived from Shell retail stations.

Shell aims to replicate this strategy and the AutoGate tool in Indonesia as well as successfully accelerate station opening by one month in advance. 

As a second recognition, Shell received the Automation – Energy award for its Automation Programme.

In response to the rising workload, Shell launched a small-scale pilot project which focused on tackling the repetitive generation of reports daily. 

The goal was to prove that it was possible for frontliners to learn to use low-code and Robotics Process Automation tools and that these tools would be suitable for the tasks within customer operation.

Rather than hiring professional developers, each region worked to identify existing frontliners who had demonstrated technical adeptness in developing small tools. These frontliners were then provided with further training on a simple RPA tool.

The automation resulted in higher quality job scope and reskilling of employees. It also offered a paradigm shift in organisational culture, focusing on the digital mindset which drives more productivity.

“As Shell embarks on its powering progress strategy to deliver for our customers and society, digital technology continues to play a significant role. We have embarked on a series of transformative journey in our organisation. Receiving these recognitions give us the confidence that we are on the right track and progressing towards this strategy. Truly proud of our team!” Heng Jonho – Customer Operations Community Lead, Malaysia

Over a period of 3 years, Shell continued to add new technologies to the automation toolset within the program.

Now, bots and automation operate across most core processes. There are bots that assist in highly complex order management requiring the complex calculation of surcharge waiver.

This has turned a process that used to take one hour per day into a fully automated process.