HELLENIC PETROLEUM Group digitally transforms with Azure to gain a competitive edge

“Led by digital initiatives, we increased the productivity of business units, upgraded the mode of operation and efficiency of our workforce, and improved our cost baseline,” says Leonidas Kovaios, General Manager of IT and Digital Transformation at HELLENIC PETROLEUM (Helpe) Group.

Moving to the cloud

As part of the strategic target to increase IT flexibility, Helpe Digital decided to migrate a significant part of its on-premises workloads to Azure cloud, aiming to transfer even more infrastructure in the near future and to improve the environmental footprint of its IT facilities by the end of 2023. “Our cloud migration journey is still underway with only 50 percent of our workloads moved to Azure. Yet, we have already reduced 30 percent of our infrastructure costs,” says Panagiotis Lykouridis, Group IT Director Operations & Infrastructure at HELLENIC PETROLEUM Group.

Helpe Digital has developed more than 20 apps and 100 automation flows, leveraging on the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform. These apps are widely used by hundreds of its employees, streamlining their work procedures and automating processes that significantly enhance customer experience. 

"We gradually succeeded in automating the management of incoming payments and the settlement of respective orders, saving time for us and our customers. Processing more than 1,000 orders used to take two to three days of manual work. Now, it only takes 30 minutes,” says George Konstantelos, Digital Transformation Manager at HELLENIC PETROLEUM Group.

In addition, Helpe Digital focuses on targeted solutions that support critical decision-making by analyzing and visualizing data through Power BI business dashboards. “Relevant, reliable, accurate information is now a click away, increasing our process transparency and improving our focus on important data-driven decisions,” says Konstantelos.

New ways of working and increased productivity

To ensure business continuity during COVID-19 lockdowns, the Group shifted to a hybrid work model by making use of Microsoft 365 collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams and Azure Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) services. "The concept of working remotely became part of our daily lives. It was amazing how quickly we were able to get 2,000 people to work from home using Azure VDI,” says Lykouridis. 

Since then, HELLENIC PETROLEUM Group has digitally empowered its employees across six countries. “We have about 4,500 users exchanging three million emails and 500,000 messages via Teams per month. We have proven in practice that change is possible, even in large companies based in multiple locations,” says Lykouridis. 

Moving forward, the Group is equipped with the capabilities and experience to rapidly develop new, targeted applications in-house as well as successfully manage its ever-expanding private cloud infrastructure. "Working with Microsoft means that we can utilize a wide range of products, ranging from IT infrastructure and development tools to collaboration and team productivity solutions. It provides us a great basis to accelerate the digital transformation of our Group,” concludes Kovaios.