Case Study: Natural Oil Co.

Natural Oil Co. is in the business of home heating equipment, oil sales and services and operating gas
(petrol) stations. The business has been built through acquisition as well as organic growth. It operates in
multiple countries, bridging linguistic territories. Natural Oil would like to do business over internet.

In the home heating sector Natural Oil would like to offer a modern customer relationship service. The
business drivers for this are improvements in customer service as well as reducing operational costs. The
company intends to implement several Customer Relationship Management Centers.

Each center will support the following functions:

Account inquiries
Payment (against preauthorized sources, e.g. credit cards)
Delivery and service order taking and dispatching
Complaints (and praises)
Issues handling

The existing environment is as follows:

There are three main legacy systems:- Accounting, Orders and Credit
The legacy systems are client server systems developed over the last 4 years (VB, MTS, and
SQL)

The proposed new environment is as follows:

A new Customer Information File created to implement Client IDs, thus allowing consolidated
access to client information (MTS / SQL).
CSRs will be located in three countries, providing support in English, French and German. Not all
locations will be multi-lingual
Customers will mostly call their local center.
Overload handling (load balancing) is required.
A large portion of customers will call from home
Primary identification of customers by Client-ID but access by names will also be supported.
7*23 operations with reduced service level in off-shift hours
Management preference for human interface over electronic voices.


Natural Oil also sees an opportunity to link the gas (petrol) station operating business with the home
heating business by offering customer accounts. In doing this they will be able to introduce loyalty
discounts as well as speeding up gas(petrol) station operations through the use of account cards at the
gas(petrol) pumps. Natural Oil believes that this synergy will allow them to aggressively canvas for new
customers.

In order to support their drive for new customers without hiring extra data entry staff, the company has
opted to make their corporate systems accessible to the public via the Internet.

Initially, they intend to support the following functions:

requests for new accounts
account inquiries
payment (against preauthorized sources, e.g. credit cards, bank accounts on file)
home heating orders (equipment and consumables)
service requests and status
information on products and services.

At a subsequent stage, payment with a credit card (not on record) should be possible, enabling on the
spot purchase of (and delivery request for) heating oil. On the Internet this raises serious security issues.

Natural Oil works with local suppliers in each of the countries that it operates. Each supplier is responsible
for ensuring that Natural Oil gas(petrol) stations are stocked. Natural Oil also has agreements with several
home heating equipment manufacturers to sell their products. Finally, Natural Oil uses certified
independent service engineers to service the home heating equipment.

Currently, Natural Oil uses EDI to send orders and receive shipping notices from suppliers, orders home
heating equipment by faxing order forms to the equipment manufacturers and receiving confirmation by
fax, and contacts its service engineers via phone.

Natural Oil would like to integrate all the above external sources into its core business process, and
manage the workflow as part of the business over internet solution. The main business processes are the
supply process for ensuring a reasonable gas(petrol) levels are maintained at each gas(petrol) station, the
problem handling process to take care of customer problems using service engineers, an RFP process to
find suitable suppliers for a gas(petrol) station, and an order process for home heating equipment. These
processes have workflows that encompasses customer accounts, purchasing, receiving, and accounting.
Natural Oil would like to ensure that the designated people/applications involved in each business process
are prompted to complete their action, and to ensure that each step moves in a timely fashion.