Microsoft Dynamics AX Success Story
Petro-Canada
Petro-Canada is one of Canada’s largest oil and gas companies with nearly 5000
employees worldwide and operating in both the upstream and the downstream
sectors of the industry, in Canada and internationally. It is involved in 5 diverse
businesses: North American Natural Gas, East Coast Oil, Alberta Oil Sands,
International Exploration & Production and Refining & Marketing. Its downstream
operations include refineries in Edmonton, AB and Montreal, QC, a lubricants plant
in Mississauga, ON and it is “Canada’s Gas Station” with a network of more than
1600 retail and wholesale outlets across Canada.
Challenge
700 of Petro-Canada’s geographically dispersed retail locations operated on a backoffice
system comprised of several locally installed applications. While the aging
legacy, store-based applications had served the retail business well, there were
recognized shortcomings; high degree of complexity for the end users – the store
managers; high training and support costs; and challenges with data management.
The Ideaca project team was challenged with addressing all of these issues and
ultimately delivering a solution that would be "Easy to Use, Easy to Manage and
Easy to Support".
Solution
Ideaca determined that the best solution would be a .NET web front-end on top of
Microsoft’s Dynamics AX. Developing a highly customized .NET front-end to
Dynamics AX provided the ease of use and intuitiveness Petro-Canada was looking
for, reducing the amount of training required as well as costly user process errors.
Furthermore, the centralized ERP system would allow Petro-Canada to effectively
manage and ensure the integrity of shared data, including vendor and product
information. Integration with Point-Of-Sale devices and several legacy applications
was facilitated with the use of Microsoft BizTalk Server. This helped manage the
large volumes of transactional data.
The iPRISM project at Petro-Canada represents one of the largest Microsoft AX
implementations in the world. Upon completion of deployment scheduled for the
spring of 2006, there will be 700 retail locations across Canada supported by the
application.
Benefits
- Reduction in business system training costs
- Reduction in store level administrative labour costs
- Reduction in help desk and support costs
- Store managers’ / district managers’ focus on operations and sales VS administration
- Site P&L within 5 days of month-end