Case Studies: Helping BP Amoco Set the Pace in the "e" World

How else to describe the stunning portfolio of e-business strategy-based transformation projects that have helped transition a noted oil & gas giant to a commanding position in the e-world? And how else to describe the speed with which these landmark assignments have unleashed change across the organization?

"Most assignments involve change, but what's so astounding about this work is the pace at which our client is achieving breakthrough success in changing itself," says Paris-based Partner Viren Doshi, who shares Officer-in-Charge duties with Art Fritzson and Harry Quarls, the engagement's Client Service Officer. "This assignment is more than e-business; it's about how to accelerate change throughout an organization. It's hard to express how extraordinary this transformation is for both the client and for those involved in the project."

Starting by using e-technology to develop an innovative approach to post-merger integration between BP and Amoco, the effort sets the standard for how fast transformational change can bring two organizations together. By realigning the entire management information baseline, the work provided senior executives with the transparency and the access to business unit level performance data — and with the ability to view it through lenses never before used.

The changes are deep, profound and pervasive. They take BP Amoco's Exploration & Production, Downstream & Chemicals businesses from the traditional diagnostic and strategy through design and implementation to a "do and learn to do" approach. That "e-strategy agenda" — since transferred across the company in hundreds of potential opportunities — creates a new paradigm at BP Amoco around innovation and cross-functional teaming. Looking to the future, it gives BP Amoco a powerful internal venture capital or incubation process to take high-impact ideas and convert them quickly to tangible businesses.

Company Foresight, Stamina

"For Booz Allen, the BP Amoco e-Business project looks like an extraordinarily successful project, where a relatively small team has generated a lot of value for the client and exercised a range of capabilities all in one place," says London-based Principal Bob Lukefahr, the project's acting handling officer.

"But at the end of the day, this isn't about how great Booz Allen is," he says. "It's a story of how a traditional or brick and mortar company had the foresight and the force of will to make e-business work against some long odds. There are lots of companies we could do this for, but very few with the courage, the stamina and the will to go and do it. BP Amoco is one of them."

The results include:

• Developing and implementing a pan-European Supply Portal that provides daily and forecast inventory positions, dynamic product cost and price indications and performance information by location. This system is being rolled out to the rest of the world, including the U.S., and will be able to offer access to customers at primary locations and to capture their orders.
• Developing and implementing OceanConnect.com, an online hub for the global shipping industry that initially includes a marine bunker fuel auction for a consortium of BP Amoco, Shell, Texaco, Chevron and others.
• Supporting BP Amoco in due diligence of several e-Business investment opportunities such as OneSwoop, ChemConnect and RedWing (GreenMountain.com).
• Helping develop more than a dozen other new e-Businesses that BP Amoco business unit managers intend to bring to market. Such high-impact "strategy-through-to-implementation" projects are thrusting BP Amoco into entirely new lines of business (such as ship brokering and emissions trading) and positioning it as a company whose business transcends the oil sector.

"Right from the start, we responded to client needs with the unusually short response time requires that is a norm in the e-Business environment," says Fritzson, a vice president based in McLean. "In a number of the assignments, we had system component deliverables with due dates measured in days, or at most weeks, instead of the more usual months or years."

The approach worked. The users got the functionality they wanted at unbelievable speed and were able to implement their ideas in record times, Doshi says. Immediately after the BP Amoco e-merger baselining effort, Booz Allen developed two intranet applications for group-wide use - a monthly People Tracking system and a Management Information Reporting System (MIRS) for support costs and allocations. This rapid idea-to-prototype delivery approach has been extended to the Supply Portal development, and to support a number of e-business launches, which include OceanConnect.com, Flightneeds.com and Helisat.com, among others.

To date, Booz Allen has delivered at least five market-facing applications to BP Amoco -- each time, driving the project clear from idea generation and strategy through business planning and partnering and implementation. In each case, the client was demanding operational systems to be iteratively developed, from pilot demos and/or prototypes with an evolving and increasing functionality. One such application, OceanConnect.com, has been valued at $400 million by venture capital institutions.

From Understanding To Confidence

In total, the Booz Allen team has engaged some 1,200 BP Amoco senior managers and executives in exploring the implications of e-business strategy, with London-based Principal Jake Melville jointly leading more than 80 percent of the one-day seminars held worldwide.

For Doshi, the seminars were crucial to spreading the learning throughout the organization. "Sharing a broad as well as a deep understanding of e-business with the clients ensures that they can take over much of the related work that Booz Allen has been performing," Doshi says. And it helps give BP Amoco senior managers, "the added confidence to aggressively seek new opportunities to leverage e-technology in their day-to-day business," he adds.

For Booz Allen, that means a service offering combining world-class strategy competence, industry expertise and an e-Technology delivery capability that is second to none. "Give us a summary idea and — working with the client — we can have a business up and running in three months," says San Francisco-based Associate Kevin Skillern. "For some of our practical strategists like Richard Verity, just give them access to a business and they will come up with at least five worthwhile ideas that they can push through to implementation."

Verity agrees. "That probably explains why none of the core team members on the BP Amoco assignment have to date left to join dot.coms," says the London-based Senior Associate. "Why quit to do what you can do within Booz Allen and for exciting clients like BP Amoco?"

Key to the firm's success is the team's commercial and government mix, which allows Booz Allen consultants to present their capabilities in real time for maximum impact. "What we did that surpassed any of our competitors' abilities was to marry the business strategy with the implementation capability in a seamless way," says Fritzson. "Our government sector programmers and web designers worked hand in hand with our commercial sector counterparts to turn vision into online reality in unbelievably short time frames."

Adds Doshi: "We consider James Benson, Robin Portman, Mark Colturi, David Vilpor and other WTB people as integral members of the BP Amoco team. We share in the late-night panic work sessions as well as in the partying to celebrate successes."

Internally, says Fritzson, the government/commercial sector mix provides a successful model for working across businesses in a structural rather than transactional way. "It encourages the development of mutual respect for capabilities, allowing us to share in the gains and actually planning a road map for new opportunities and clients," he says.

Such a model is seamlessly integrated, say Booz Allen consultants working on the project. It creates a whole new type of venture capital opportunity in which the firm can serve as a general partner and reap a share of the potential upside.

"No question this should be the model going forward," says Benson. "This team did a tremendous job of paralleling commercial- and government-sector strategy. In today's market, clients have a challenging time grasping where to start and how to seize something tangible. At BP Amoco, integrating the team ultimately drove each component to new levels of design and technology advancement."

Doshi agrees. "Our work has demonstrated that Booz Allen is unique among the strategy consulting firms in our ability to deliver world-class strategy right through to delivery," he says. "At BP Amoco, we are in the business of building businesses. And we're able to do it better and faster than anyone else out there."

Andrew Moutrie, head of BP Amoco's e-merger and e-commerce strategy:

"We're building a competency for some of the more intangible things associated with the new economy. What the Internet enables you to do from a consulting and a management perspective is to collapse strategy and tactics. So, it becomes very important to be able to develop the technology hand-in-hand with the business strategy and the tactics."

"What Booz Allen adds is relentless analytical rigor and a total focus on creating value for the client. They have created business cases and working prototypes for some of the things that have helped us engage partners successfully. Most of the work I've done with Booz Allen has been in multi-disciplinary teams where the focus is on creating value for the client or for client's stakeholders and customers."