Certas Energy Retail achieves 98% leak detection accuracy using Zoho Analytics

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    40+Trusted users
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    98%Increase in Leak Detection Accuracy
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    85%Increase in Site Downtime Detection Accuracy

"Zoho Analytics was able to give a very public and precise view on how our remote sites are being managed across Europe. It highlights critical issues like leak detection at the right time which is very important for a company like us. With Zoho Analytics, we can now assess our vendors without any bias."

- Greg McAuliffe, Head of Information Technology, Certas Energy Retail

About Certas Energy Retail

Certas Energy Retail Europe, is a subsidiary of DCC plc, an FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 company. The company manages 500+ petrol stations across Europe, 250 ESSO-branded sites in Norway, 240 Shell-branded sites in Denmark, and 330 ESSO-branded sites in France. They have a presence in Austria and Ireland, too.

Challenges: Enormous amounts of data, but no insights

Certas Energy Retail operates in a “hub and spoke” model. Their key functions, like pricing, supply, finance, and back office, are operated remotely from Central Operations Hub in Ireland, while vendors look after sales, marketing, logistics, and operations.

The company manages over 800+ sites with just 80 people, conducting around 70 million transactions a year, and consolidating sales across Europe into their central system. This led to enormous data generation, and they were in need of an analytics solution that could process large sets of data and provide insights out of it.

Greg McAuliffe is the Head of IT for Certas Energy Retail. His primary responsibilities are to own the IT function of Certas, and perform analytics on site issues, compliance, and vendor performance, remotely from Ireland.

The company outsources most of its work to third party vendors. They have multiple vendors responsible for POS equipment, petrol pumps, pricing, and much more. A big challenge for Greg was to track issues arising on their sites. He was in need of an overall picture that could show the problem, and its nature and location, across sites.

Certas Energy Retail wanted a solution that could:

  • Import and blend raw data from their central operations hub
  • Get actionable insights through reports and dashboards, and publish them to internal executives and external vendors
  • Enable secure sharing of reports and dashboards with user-based permissions

Earlier they tried to develop reports on Excel, but it required continuous manual intervention, from fetching data to creating dashboards, which was a complex task.

Certas Energy Retail achieves 98% leak detection accuracy using Zoho Analytics

"We have multiple departments, and the main one is reporting issues in sites. We want to do two things. First, we want to encourage our vendors to log and report issues to the central desk. Two, we want a platform that shows a vendor's performance in real time, thereby increasing visibility, and reducing SLA breaches and vendor bias."

Greg McAuliffe
Head of Information Technology, Certas Energy Retail

Solution: Real-time insights with Zoho Analytics

Certas Retail was using Zoho Desk as their central operations hub to log and report issues from multiple sites.

Being a Zoho customer, they came across Zoho Analytics. Since most of their data resided in Zoho Desk, they considered Zoho Analytics an ideal solution, as the integration between them was quick to set up. They didn't look at other BI tools, as Zoho Analytics matched their requirements.

"Zoho Analytics provided a non-biased picture of how our third party vendors are performing against their agreed SLAs. Vendors were able to clearly see geomaps and dashboards through public URLs. They can now compare their own standards with other vendors, and see if they're slipping or improving. The feedback we got from them was very positive and it's easy for us to track SLA breaches as they happen."

As a next step, Zoho Desk was integrated and blended into Zoho Analytics, using Zoho Analytics's built-in connectors and auto-blending options.

Features like graphs, dashboards, geomaps, and built-in reports were of interest to the company. Using geomaps, they even geotagged their sites to see open issues.

The company uses Zoho Analytics for analyzing, managing, and tracking:

  • Site metrics, including the number of current outages, active open issues by location, number of pump issues, payment card issues, leak detection, and more, on a daily basis.
  • Compliance metrics, like SLA breaches and the amount of noncompliance by vendors, are taken on a monthly basis. These are built-in reports offered by Zoho Analytics.

With Zoho Analytics, Certas Retail got a non-biased view on vendor performance. A complete snapshot of the tickets from open till close was tracked, enabling end-to-end operational analytics.

And on the other side, vendors were also able to track their performance and compare it with their peers in real time.

Certas Retail improved their accuracy in detecting site downtime to 85%⁠ - earlier they were receiving 180 false alarms per month, and now its down to 30 per month, after using Zoho Analytics.

Also, Zoho Analytics enabled real-time tracking of leak detection across sites, and level 1 tickets are now automatically assigned to the respective vendors as soon as any leak is detected.

This has reduced leak detection false alarms from 64 every day to 1 per month⁠ - nearly 98% accuracy.

Implementing Zoho Analytics enabled continuous improvement for Certas, by identifying critical showstoppers well in advance, gathering input from stakeholders, and improving their services.

The reports and dashboards are collaborated on with 40+ internal users and 10+ external vendors across Europe.

Benefits & results

  • Enabled non-biased assessment of third-party vendors
  • Leak detection false alarm reduced from 64 per day to 1 per month, leading to 98% accuracy
  • Site downtime false alarms reduced from 180 to 30 per month, leading to 85% accuracy
  • Enabled end-to-end operational analytics
  • Identify SLA breaches in real time.