The iconic Ampol brand is in the midst of returning to Australia, with more than 200 former Caltex sites having already been rebranded to Ampol since August 2020.
But further to the rebuild of the famed Ampol brand, the company is also undergoing a digital transformation in the form of a multi-year strategy featuring a major cloud migration, including the replacement of legacy, on-premises systems with software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
Ampol implemented Boomi to replace what Lindsay Hoare, Head of Technology at Ampol calls a “spaghetti junction” featuring hundreds of on-premises, point-to-point integrations.
“In an organisation as diverse as Ampol – running hundreds of technology solutions crucial to daily workflows, retail operations, and customer experience initiatives – we needed something in the middle to connect the data being generated.
“We also needed to orchestrate it across the organisation. This became especially important once we started bringing new digital assets to the business.”
With a full view of the company’s technologies and processes and eliminating extensive manual data entry from employees’ workflows – from shipping activities, stock levels, and supply, right through to service fuel prices and its fuel card initiatives – Ampol’s not only countering the back-end complexities of the rebrand, but rapidly bringing new services to market.
Boomi enables Ampol to deliver new system integration services 70 per cent faster and at 30 per cent of the previous cost, providing a secure and scalable way of connecting customer, supplier, and SaaS platforms to its self-hosted IT applications. The speed and reduced cost of leveraging the Boomi platform has allowed Ampol IT to deliver many projects, including smaller projects that previously would not have had viable business cases.
Ampol recently partnered with UberEats and indicated plans to pivot to electric to reach net zero emissions by 2040.
“As well as connecting Ampol’s IT environment, Boomi feeds accurate information back into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform in near-real-time so it can be analysed to inform business decisions – for example, fuel prices, stock levels, and shipping activities. With a single, automated platform handling information anonymously, our people can get on with their jobs. We don’t need to think about how the data got there, whether it’s reliable or protected, or if there could be missing pieces,” added Hoare.
Ampol has built and launched a suite of core reusable integration services with Boomi that have been repurposed hundreds of times, enabling critical business functions and linking core business applications, including the ERP platform, customer relationship management (CRM), point-of-sales (POS), and supply chain systems.
With a two-tier architecture stack and Boomi’s low-code design, Ampol is enabling a common cybersecurity framework to be easily maintained and implemented, while also allowing for more rapid development of integration services.
One of Ampol’s first Boomi projects was to implement an integrated bulk fuel ordering process for its commercial fuel customers. This process has already been reused over 60 times and is enabling supply chain deals to be delivered reliably against tight timeframes.
“Boomi’s reusability and service-driven architecture has helped us deliver new services to stakeholders much faster, reduced integration costs, and increased reliability as we’ve eliminated extensive manual data entry from our employees’ workflows,” said Hoare.
He continued, “In another example, the ongoing administration and logistics behind our rebrand to Ampol required significant updates to site information to ensure all data points are accurate. Boomi provided a single, reusable master data service that didn’t require any manual re-entry at any stage of the Location Master project. The data could be maintained once, extracted, and then, using APIs, securely transmitted to the correct endpoints – whether it’s the Ampol FuelPay mobile app, Google Maps or the Site locator on the Ampol public website.”