A successful partnership thrives on mutual benefit, and Kinaxis and ExxonMobil exemplify this well.
With over 140 years of industry experience under its belt, ExxonMobil is renowned as one of the largest energy companies globally, while Kinaxis brings its market-leading supply chain expertise and digital innovation to the party.
In October 2024, Kinaxis announced a co-development deal with ExxonMobil to create supply chain technology solutions designed specifically for the energy sector. Empowered by the growing demand for energy products that support modern life, the companies are working together to identify supply chain challenges unique to the energy sector and create a potential industry solution to mitigate them.
Kinaxis and ExxonMobil: Inside partnership
Now, Kinaxis and ExxonMobil focus on a supply and demand planning solution for the complex fuel commodities market which has no industry-wide standard and relies heavily on spreadsheets and other manual methods.
The solution enables integrated refinery-to-customer planning with timely data for the most accurate supply/demand planning, balancing and signaling. Some of the benefits include automated data visibility, improved inventory management and terminal replenishment, and enhanced supply scenario planning that are expected to enable arbitrage opportunities and decrease supply costs.
Today, ExxonMobil has centralised its supply chain function across the enterprise. Rozena Dendy, Global Sales and Operations Planning Manager at ExxonMobil, explains that in the past few years, her organisation has made a significant amount of effort to transform businesses and how it views its centralised offering.
“We’re organised with three value chains, so that’s the upstream where we take crude oil out of the ground, product solutions where we have fuels and products we use every day, as well as having our low carbon solutions which are all part of our ambition to net zero,” she explains. “With those three value chains, they provide scale and as well as how we maximise competitive advantage. Where we come into play is our centralised organisation and we are organised to make sure we have those capabilities deployed across those value chains so that we can deliver more value. Ultimately, our supply chain organisation stood up in the last two years to be able to scale and exemplify supply chain excellence and provide additional value to our bottom line.”
Competitive advantage
David Kelly, Executive VP, Global Professional Services at Kinaxis, believes that one of the key differentiators that makes ExxonMobil’s approach unique lies within the freshness of the supply chain team. “A lot of companies we are involved with already have a global team in place. But with ExxonMobil, there were so many different product lines that they were running with their supply chain operations that they decided to bring it all under one umbrella,” he explains.
“We’re working very closely with them to be innovative in coming up with capabilities, mainly in the upstream and in the fuels area to create solutions for the industry that will drive greater value and efficiency across the board. That’s a key differentiator from what we see with many of our other customers on a large-scale basis. Other companies typically had Chief Supply Chain Officers in place for many, many years. This is a little different, it’s very exciting and innovative, especially to be working with a company that has been around for 140 years too. We’re breaking new ground with such an established company in the world.”
ExxonMobil partnership
As ExxonMobil is one of the world’s largest global oil and gas companies and sells multiple products, harnessing agility and efficiency into operations is essential. To achieve this, Dendy explains that supply chain orchestration is a key enabler. “What is nice is how we’re truly organised with having both capabilities and the execution teams all under one umbrella,” she affirms.
“With that, we are organised to have supply chain end-to-end planning, which I actually own. We have logistics excellence, we have materials management, and we have the digital network and advanced analytics, which we call our DNA as far as how we’re applying that across the entire corporation. What’s unique is we’re under one supply chain president who reports to our management committee. Ultimately what we are doing is how we are not only just managing but truly transforming and harmonising the processes and the technology across the entire corporate enterprise. There are spaces where we’re innovating, there are also spaces in which we’re actually deploying. We’re pretty excited and we are also on our transformation journey with upstream as well.”
Change management
Many companies struggle to fully scale supply chain solutions. Dendy believes there are three key factors that are helping ExxonMobil to successfully implement these technologies at scale. “For us, it starts with three things,” she says. “You have to have alignment at the actual leadership level and we have alignment all the way through our management committee to make sure we are focused on delivering the best from the capabilities that the supply chain actually has. Then with the alignment, it also goes into the business line and making sure they are adopting it.
“The second thing is ensuring there is strong change management through your organisation with the changes that you’re trying to adopt. Then it is about how you focus on user adoption. It’s not just about deploying the magic cutting-edge tool of the day, but actually deploying tools that are solving a business problem and making sure that we’re maximising the effort so that we not only demonstrate supply chain excellence but also get the value out of the tool and enhance the user experience as well.”
Kelly adds that one of the special parts of working with ExxonMobil in the upstream and midstream area is that Kinaxis is not replacing existing technologies but instead phone calls and spreadsheets. “What’s interesting about that is that change management and user adoption is even harder than replacing their technology because people are so accustomed to calling someone they know personally to get something done,” discusses Kelly. “This has been one of the biggest drivers for us.”
Technology transformation
Kinaxis Maestro is the only AI-infused end-to-end supply chain orchestration platform for fast, intelligent decision-making. Fusing together multiple proprietary analytical technologies and techniques, Maestro empowers customers to find the right answer at the right time and speed for businesses. This allows for agility and efficiency despite the situation. Maestro infused AI across supply chains in an approachable way to allow for smarter decision-making, faster and at a lower total cost. Kelly explains that while AI is one of the biggest buzzwords in the industry today, it is important to collaborate with companies on how to correctly use the data.
“It’s about figuring out how can we use AI capabilities to make decisions more efficiently and even potentially remove the human element from making a decision,” he explains. “From a supply chain orchestration perspective with ExxonMobil, it’s important that we get the orchestration right first and then we can get a better understanding of where the capabilities are going long-term. AI requires data, so you have to have lots of data for AI to work effectively. It’s not just data within the four walls of ExxonMobil, but external data as well. It could be weather signals, transportation signals or any number of elements like that. That has to be locked in too to make the AI capabilities highly effective.”
Navigating AI’s challenge
For Dendy, the key element to leveraging AI properly is ensuring it isn’t used for the sake of it. Getting people on board to adopt new systems and ways of working is an essential part of any change management journey and is an area that Dendy does not underestimate. “We are working across the enterprise on our AI, not just having our foundation in place, but making sure that we’re truly using it to solve an actual problem,” she discusses. “It’s about finding out what problem are you trying to solve, how you are extracting value, and making sure that you have the data, people and process in place. Enhancing and elevating what humans are doing is important.”
However, despite technology’s draws sometimes the workforce is committed to falling back on familiar legacy systems and processes. But the way to combat this, as Dendy explains, is fostering a process ‘designed to win’ which is the secret sauce to success in any technology transformation journey. “Your culture has to be one about winning or competing to actually win,” she affirms. “It’s not just about winning on its own, it’s about how you win with an actual standard. It’s critically important, you’ve got a process that’s designed to win. Getting the hearts and minds on board is vital because it’s about getting the most out of new tools, changing the way people work to extract the most value and bringing users along that process too.”
Managing the value of AI
Kelly adds that one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding advanced technologies is believing that AI is a magic wand that will hold all the answers. Kelly stresses that organisations should adopt a more strategic and thoughtful approach to leveraging AI for the best results.
“A lot of people want to deploy AI for AI’s sake,” he reveals. “Sometimes they believe it’s going to do so many great things for them, but what they need to understand is you need the specific data signals and data in place normalised to be able to leverage the capabilities that AI has to offer. We are working with a number of companies today, particularly retail or consumer packaged goods who are suppliers to retail, and getting their data signals so they can drive greater forecast accuracy. We’ll be doing the same with ExxonMobil and we will be working with them in the same capacity in AI. But to get that right, you’ve got to have that data and those proper signals in place to be able to have the AI models work effectively.”
With an eye on the future, Kelly has several focus areas on the agenda about how to drive profitability for his organisation, ExxonMobil and the companies it serves. “It’s about looking at how we can drive forecast efficiency, reduce forecast volumes and increase bottom line profitability for the likes of ExxonMobil and our customers,” says Kelly. “While efficiency is good, what most companies and shareholders care about is maximising the profitability of the overall organisation. It’s about how we can focus on that for our customers and drive that efficiency which will be key in the industry moving forward.”
Find out more about Kinaxis and ExxonMobil.
- AI in Supply Chain
- Collaboration & Optimization
