Process / Operation Transformation Case

Situation

You have been with the firm for 4 weeks and have just returned from your first school at St Charles. Your first client is BigOil, a global oil company running a national chain of retail petrol stations in Australia.

As part of a broader organizational transformation initiative, you have been tasked to diagnose the issues with the Market Intelligence & Pricing Unit (MIPU). This centralized team analyses market information and communicates prices to both company owned & operated outlets and company branded & independently operated outlets.

Petrol retailers change prices frequently up to several times a day - responding to global, national and local conditions (e.g. competitors' prices in the neighborhood). Currently, BigOil's field sales staff monitor competitors' prices in defined neighborhoods and communicate (via wireless PDA) back to the MIPU every 2-3 hours. The MIPU analyses the information and faxes the updated recommended price list to the petrol stations.

BigOil believes that it can improve revenue and profitability by changing prices more frequently, reacting promptly to changes in local market conditions.

Extract of your manager's notes from a previous meeting with the client sponsor:

• Poor compliance to the process by BigOil sales staff and the petrol station operators.
• The process and the supporting systems evolved over the last 2-3 years, with occasional input from the sales team.
• Early morning failures of pricing analysis due to incomplete master data stored crude oil prices, foreign exchange rate etc. maintained by the ERP support team).
• The systems were developed in-house and had several modifications on the original version
• Unstable PDA interface, poor error handling in the pricing system overall.

1. What approach would you take to understand the current pricing process and identify the issues and opportunities for improvement?
2. What are the important considerations in strategy, business process, people and technology to transform the MIPU into a high performance group? The solution should be explained through several lenses like People, Process, and Technology
3. What is the recommended slide structure for the presentation?