Spanish multi-energy company Repsol is on a mission to empower its employees with the help of technology. As part of this goal, the organization has partnered with Microsoft and Kabel to create the Do It Yourself program – an initiative aimed at encouraging citizen development across its global workforce. Rolled out just 18 months ago, the project has already found outstanding success at Repsol, helping to build a new community of innovation-driven citizen developers and save millions in costs.
“The greatest achievement for me is the community that our project has helped to build. We’ve managed to bring together people from all parts of the world, value chain and departments, and give them the confidence, pride and support to create whatever tools they may need.”
Javier Espasa, Head of the DIY Center of Excellence at Repsol, is discussing the impact that citizen development is having on his organization – and the cultural shift this has triggered.
“At Repsol, we employ more than 24,000 people across more than 30 countries and 70 different nationalities,” says Espasa. “From our head offices in Spain, all the way to our Latin America facilities and beyond, we’re at the head of a multi-faceted workforce that has multiple needs, ambitions and goals.”
Empowering each employee to achieve these goals and ambitions is something that Repsol considers paramount to its success. To do this, the company has come up with a groundbreaking new initiative that aims to encourage app and solution development across its entire workforce. All using Microsoft’s low-code technology.
“I truly believe that low-code technology is the biggest, most game-changing solution the market has to offer,” he says.
“That’s what our program is all about: embracing a low-code mindset to put people at the heart of Repsol’s digital transformation strategy.”
Out with the spreadsheets, in with the low-code tech
One of the largest multi-energy organizations in the world, Repsol provides services to some 24 million customers in more than 90 countries.
With project spanning Spain, Perú and the USA, the company is on a mission to place itself at the forefront of digital innovation in its sector and beyond.
“Technology has always been a critical part of our business,” explains Espasa. “Wherever in the world we operate, we use a wealth of solutions that are heavily digitalized and tied with analytics, intelligence and efficiency.”
Throughout his decade working within Repsol’s IT department, Espasa has led many digital initiatives within the organization – helping, for example, to build its cybersecurity architecture and to realize the digital workplace through Office 365.
More recently, he’s been looking into using these solutions to give employees more autonomy, opening them up to app development and IT self-service. “I believe that the future of Repsol lies in our employees and the technology that can empower them,” he explains.
“But for years, this wasn’t entirely possible, as we hugely relied on documents and spreadsheets –from the smallest parts like employee tracking to mid-profile operations.”
Everything changed when, attending a conference, he was presented with the transformational benefits of low-code technology. “I had already heard of low-code solutions but had never seen the real impact these could have on the workforce,” he continues.
“It was the very birth of our Do It Yourself program.”
The program in a nutshell
The Do It Yourself (DIY) program is a flagship initiative that opens the Microsoft Power Platform suite and its low-code development tools to all employees.
“According to analyst estimates, 500 million apps will be built in the next five years alone,” explains Espasa. “These are numbers that any IT department would struggle to meet. So, we’ve chosen to ride this wave and teach our workforce to develop them themselves.”
The program aims to extend the reach of low-code solutions – particularly Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI – across Repsol’s departments.
Key to its success is a DIY Center of Excellence that the company has created in collaboration with local Microsoft partner Kabel and its parent company Avanade, which aims to foster good governance, standardization and adoption amongst Repsol’s employees.
“Each of our people now has access to a wealth of programs to create tailor-made, low-code solutions that meet their own needs,” says Espasa. “We call these people ‘makers’ and we already have 1,000 of them across the world.”
From South American factories to Madrid’s home office
With more than 486 apps already active, Repsol’s DIY program is fast gaining traction across hundreds of departments around the world.
As Espasa explains, the number of solutions has grown so much that Repsol has divided them into three different groups – personal, departmental, or enterprise – based on the size of the teams using them. “The enterprise apps are the ones we at IT usually create, while the departmental ones are used by 20-40 people, and we can help our makers maintain them,” he adds.
Take Repsol’s commercial department, for example. Here, a team recently developed a mobile application to support the rollout of a training campaign across Repsol’s service stations. “This has hugely helped to reduce our use of paper records,” he adds, “all while empowering our trainers to work more efficiently.”
Another app developed in South America concerns the movement of fuel. “One of our teams there carries out various services for a mining facility that also oversees the provisioning of fuel, which needs huge coordination,” he says.
“This used to be done using an Excel spreadsheet,” he continues. “But now the local team has developed an app that keeps track of truck movements, the liters of fuel being provisioned, the state of the product and everything in-between.”
Quantifying the impacts of the DIY Program
The DIY Program has already proved to be a worthy investment. “We’ve estimated savings of about €5 million between 2022 and 2023,” comments Espasa, a hint of pride in his eyes. “But even more important than the economic savings is the cultural change that this program is generating – and the community that has blossomed since its launch.
“We keep track of user and app progress via Power BI, but we’ve also set up a Microsoft Teams group of more than 2,000 people called SOS DIY,” he says. “Here, our most active users can share their projects, ask for advice and discuss ideas.”
“To strengthen this community, we set up a competition, encouraging users to vote on the best application of the year,” he adds.
But the success of the initiative has been such, that not even Microsoft technology has been able to contain it. “One day, we literally challenged Teams,” he jokes. “One of the projects submitted in the competition received more votes than even Teams had capacity to register!”
Next steps
Repsol is already planning the next steps for its Do It Yourself Program. “Our community grows by the day, so we want to make sure that we continue to address their needs,” says Espasa.
“We want to start hosting recurring hackathons and broader, in-person meetings that can help encourage knowledge-sharing.”
With plans to introduce new technology – such as Power Virtual Agents – Repsol is looking to the long term, paving way for a new workforce of empowered, innovation-driven makers with big dreams and the tools to realize them.
“The most prolific makers are often young, straight-out-of-university workers, so that’s exactly where we want to invest,” he concludes.
“Together with Microsoft and Kabel, we want to make Repsol a place that inspires the workforce of tomorrow, giving them the power to achieve what they want – and ultimately do more, with less.”
“I truly believe that low-code technology is the biggest, most game-changing solution the market has to offer.”
Javier Espasa, Head of the DIY Center of Excellence, Repsol
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