Objectives – Rethinking supply supervision

Bolloré Energy distributes heating oil, diesel, and gas oil to 600,000 private and professional customers worldwide. On the occasion of the technical overhaul of the main application used by its petroleum product supply service, Bolloré Energy asked ekino and MFG Labs to assist in this tool’s functional and visual design. The objective for this new application was to better support the department’s employees in their daily missions:

• The daily setting of basic sales prices used by the sales agencies.
• Management of stocks and product orders.
• Monitoring the coverage of sales and purchases of products on the stock markets.

Challenges – How to design a tool adapted to different uses in a complex business context?

The oil market being highly fluctuating, the employees of the supply department needed personalised tools. This application had to be efficient and flexible to quickly react to unforeseen events such as a drop in oil prices or strikes at a storage site.

We faced three main challenges:

• Understanding a complex business context between logistics and financial trading.
• Rationalising the ecosystem of tools, transforming new uses, historically very spreadsheet-oriented, into ergonomic interfaces that allow the best possible visualisation of data.
• Engage business teams by quickly presenting them with operational and directly implementable solutions.

Our solution – Integrate the business teams into the design process

To better understand the reality of the different business uses, and to challenge the specifications initially provided, we proposed the project teams an initial phase of observation and interviews with all the department’s employees.

Subsequently, they were fully integrated into the tool’s co-design workshops, either by participating in creating the journeys or by validating the possible solutions. The involvement of all future users in the design of the application facilitated its subsequent adoption.

The results – Improved business performance and experience

Co-creation allowed Bolloré Energy’s business teams to truly identify their functional needs. The business teams were entirely on board and convinced by the approach, thereby ensuring this new tool’s adoption once in production. We are proud to have contributed to

• The design of complex business tools for the energy sector
• A user-centric methodology that takes into account the needs, uses, and cognitive reality of users
• Immersion in the business, analysis of uses and needs in the field
• The creation of business interfaces with high stakes in the visualisation of a large quantity of data.