Digitizing downstream transportation logistics

Call for change

In the Oil and Gas industry, transportation is crucial to ensuring the consistent flow of petroleum products that supply gas stations and essential services.

This is especially true for Argentine energy company YPF, which has to reach thousands of fuel stations and clients each day. Timely transportation of its products is vital and complex, especially given the additional imperatives of minimizing its carbon footprint, ensuring the safe planning of each trip, and being more efficient.

The company needed to make the planning and scheduling of downstream transportation faster and more efficient. YPF knew that a strong, data-driven, digital foundation would be essential to achieving this ambition—powered by a platform that would deliver greater information, insights and decision making.

When tech meets human ingenuity

The Accenture and YPF team first collaborated to define what a cutting-edge logistics planning capability could look like. The team then collected all the information to model YPF’s supply chain. Finally, the team leveraged a suite of technologies, including Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform, to ensure the logistics planning solution could solve complex routing problems and consider multiple variables.

YPF’s new digital solution uses data to optimize daily, monthly and annual logistics planning. In addition to system integration, the main advantage that the solution offers is the optimizer, which uses inventory routing, heuristics and metaheuristics to generate the most efficient routes. The optimizer can project when gas stations will run out of fuel and need to be re-supplied by pulling data from thousands of variables and delivering insights within minutes.

A valuable difference

With this new solution, YPF is supplying customers with the fuel they need to keep their lives and businesses running.

By automating transportation logistics, YPF can now anticipate demand and react accordingly. YPF provides a better experience for employees, too. The company’s associates can now quickly generate possible scenarios and analyze the results. And the initiative is fueling a larger digital transformation, with YPF operating in the Azure cloud and associates accessing and sharing data at a volume never seen before.

With the new solution, YPF has significantly reduced stockouts and brought down its carbon footprint by 20%. What’s more, drivers are benefitting from safer routes and a more effective delivery process.

While it’s certainly an impressive feat, it’s just a first step on YPF’s journey to ensuring everyone—from gas stations to hospitals to industries and people—have the fuel they need, every day.