Unlocking Automation for Intelligent Operations and Business Growth

A modern, agile IT infrastructure has become the critical enabler for success, allowing organizations to unlock the potential of new technologies such as AI, analytics, and automation. Yet modernization journeys are often bumpy; IT leaders must overcome barriers such as resistance to change, management complexity, high costs, and talent shortages.

Those successful in their modernization endeavors can expect significant business gains. In Ampol’s case, the transport fuels provider enjoyed enhanced operational efficiency, business agility, and maximized service uptimes.

A vision for transformation, hampered by legacy

Ampol had a clear goal: intelligent operations for improved service reliability, increased agility, and reduced cost. To achieve this, Ampol created a vision centered on “uplifting and modernizing existing cloud environment and practices,” according to Lindsay Hoare, Ampol’s Head of Technology.

This meant having enterprise-wide visibility and environment transparency for real-time updates, modernizing its environment management capabilities with cloud-based and cloud-ready tools, building the right capabilities and skillsets for the cloud, redesigning the current infrastructure into a cloud-first one, and leveraging automation for enhanced operations.  

While Ampol had most workloads in the cloud, it is still highly dependent on its data center. This meant added complexity to infrastructure networking and management, which in turn drove up maintenance and management costs. The need for human intervention across the environment further increased the risk of error and resultant downtime. Its ambition to enable automation across the entire enterprise, at that point in time, felt unattainable as it lacked the technical expertise and capabilities to do so.

Realizing its ambitions with the right partner

Ampol knew it was not able to modernize its enterprise and bridge the ambition gap alone. It then turned to Accenture. “We needed a partner with a cloud mindset, one that could cover the technological breadth at which Ampol operates,” said Hoare. “Hence why we turned to Accenture, with whom we’ve built a strong partnership that has spanned over a decade.”

Accenture has been helping Ampol in its digital transformation journey across many aspects of its IT operations and as such has a deep understanding of Ampol’s automation ambitions.

“We brought to the table our AIOps capability that leverages automation, analytics, and AI for intelligent operations. Through our ongoing work with Ampol, we were able to accelerate cloud adoption alongside automation implementation, reducing implementation and deployment time,” said Duncan Eadie, Accenture’s Managing Director of Cloud, Infra, and Engineering for AAPAC.

Reaping business benefits through intelligent operations

Through its collaboration with Accenture, Ampol was able to realize its vision for intelligent operations which then translates to business benefits.

Visualization and monitoring

Ampol can now quickly pinpoint incidents to reduce the time to resolve. Recently, a device failure impacted Ampol’s retail network and service stations, but a map-based visualization of the network allowed engineers to identify the device and switch over to the secondary within the hour: an 85% improvement in downtime reduction.

Self-healing capabilities

Intelligent operations not only detect failures but also attempt to resolve them independently and create incidents for human intervention only when basic resolution is unsuccessful. As a result, Ampol’s network incidents have been reduced by 40% while business-impacting retail incidents are down by half.

Automating mundane tasks

Automation now regularly takes care of mundane and routine tasks such as patching, updates, virtual machine builds, and software installs. This frees up employees’ time that is otherwise spent on maintenance, enabling them to innovate and add real business value through working on more strategic assignments and business growth.

Future-proofing

As Ampol focuses on the global energy transition, it is investing in new energy solutions in a highly dynamic environment. A cloud-first infrastructure removes complexity, increases the levels of abstraction, and offers greater leverage of platform services, enabling agility and responsiveness. The right architecture and security zoning facilitate critical business-led experimentation and innovation to ensure Ampol continues to place at the front of the pack.

As IT infrastructure becomes a critical enabler across industries, organizations are compelled to embrace modernization. While significant roadblocks exist, a clear vision and the right partner can help overcome challenges and unlock the potential of the cloud, AI and analytics, and automation, to be a true game-changer.

“This is a long journey,” says Hoare, “we’ve been at it for years now… It needs drive and tenacity. But when you get there, you’ll be in a great place.”

Learn more about getting started with a modern infrastructure here.