Harnessing the Power of a Petrol Station’s Location – A Shell Case Study

Alistair Fox

Jacobs, Spatial

Shellis one of the world’s largest integrated energy companies. The public face of the company is represented by the Shell Retail network of nearly 45,000 service stations that we all drive into on a daily basis. As with other retail businesses, location is the key to ensuring that the right market advantage is achieved.

The Shell Global Network Planning team is responsible for carrying out standard network planning practises in order to maintain and expand the Shell Retail business in the right locations. Some parts of the business have used Location Technology to assist in this process.

Shell Retail has a wealth of data residing in many different databases across its service station network. Historically network planning teams around the globe would access this data in different ways. Some would use spreadsheets, others paper maps, but in general no real consistency was employed. The challenge of ‘big data’ was not being met, and something had to be done to support the business aspiration of being the best fuels retailer in the world.

To improve performance in this area Shell embarked upon a projectwith the following vision:

  • Tohelp Network Teams capture and visually analyze “big data” to make decisions and plans, faster, better, together.
  • Provide an information and analytics platform to support effective collaboration and sharing of best practices
  • Help embednetwork competencies and practices more consistently and faster across all markets

This case study will show how Jacobs, ESRI and Shell have successfully deployed location technology to 14 countries globally, with more to come in 2015.

The location technology, in this case a platform called ArcGIS Online, meets the challenge of ‘big data’ as it can store and disseminate seven core Shell databases consistently to the global network planning business.Coupled with externally sourced competitor data and ESRI’s demographic and base data;this has allowed the same tasks to be carried out with greater consistency and accuracy. Users are picking up new skills and gaining a broader understanding of the power of location. They can now quickly answer questions such as:

  • Where are my competitors located?
  • Where are the gaps in our market coverage?
  • How are the current sites performing?

The result to date has been a great success, with many more lessons still likely to be learned. This case study offers a strong example in how the retail industry can harness the power of location technology.