Efficient Product Planning in Seconds thanks to new Web Application
Shell is a global energy company with a wide range of activities in the oil and gas industry. In addition, Shell is strongly committed to the development of renewable energy and invests in projects to reduce CO2 emissions. With over 90'000 employees in more than 70 countries, Shell is one of the largest energy companies in the world. It serves more than 30 million customers worldwide every day. In Switzerland, Shell is a well-known supplier of quality fuels at around 300 petrol stations under the brand name of the same name. In addition to the filling station business, the company is also active in the lubricants, aviation and bitumen sectors. Shell is also committed to promoting hydrogen mobility in Switzerland as a member of the Swiss H2 Mobility Association.
Initial Situation
Shell Lubricants in Bern specializes in biodegradable hydraulic oils and greases as well as products for wind turbines. It also produces gear and compressor oils for special applications. Shell has been using an application called «Method of Manufactoring», which is based on Microsoft Access, for the production of lubricants for many years. This tool was developed to manage the available raw materials and components and to provide the recipe for their preparation. However, the previous tool had reached its limits in recent years. The outdated technology led to problems with the maintenance, operation and further development of the application. In particular, the performance when importing master data and generating reports was no longer acceptable.
In view of these challenges, an urgent overhaul of the existing tool was required. The technology, which was innovative decades ago, had to be replaced by more modern solutions in order to improve the maintainability and performance of the application. This should not only increase efficiency, but also lay the foundation for future developments.
Solution
In close cooperation with the Shell team in Bern, isolutions has developed an innovative solution for the strategically important «Method of Manufactoring» application. A modern web application was developed to ensure that the application meets the high requirements in the future and can be further developed flexibly. As part of the project, all data was migrated to the new cloud environment. The new «Method of Manufactoring» now runs completely cloud-native and serverless in the Azure Cloud. This redesign means that the «Method of Manufactoring» tool is scalable at any time and can be easily adapted to Shell's needs. One of the biggest advantages is that the application no longer needs to be rolled out and installed on the various client systems. Instead, all functions can be conveniently accessed via the web browser. Particular emphasis was placed on security. Although the application is hosted in Azure, Shell's login infrastructure was connected. This allows employees to log in with their usual Shell logins. Identity verification is carried out at the highest security level and the entire application has successfully passed extensive external security and penetration tests.
To further relieve Shell, the solution was set up with active monitoring as software as a service. This allows isolutions to take over the operation and support of the application completely. The project was implemented extremely efficiently in a very short time and the expected project goals were even exceeded. In particular, the speed of importing product data and generating reports was significantly increased. Instead of minutes, these processes now only take a few seconds. The data is available immediately, and all this is made possible by state-of-the-art web technology developed as a single page application based on .NET and React. Shell now has a powerful, user-friendly and secure application that is optimally tailored to current and future requirements.
Benefits
- More efficient management of products, instructions and recipes
- Import products and generate reports in seconds instead of minutes
- Responsive: the application can be used from any end device
- Maximum infrastructure and application security (particularly important for recipes, some of which are secret)
- Future-proof technology thanks to serverless and cloud native
- Further development and updating possible at any time
- New web application completely eliminates deployment effort
- Continuous deployment: the application is deployed automatically by automating end-to-end processes
- Operation and support completely ensured by isolutions (no effort for internal IT)