Suncor Energy battles for profit margins in the retail petrol market using mobile BlackBerry handhelds and solutions.

12 August 2004, CALGARY, ALBERTA: Walk into any of 300 Sunoco petrol stations in North America. Fully-filled shelves. Pristine and clean washrooms. Courteous and friendly attendants. The appearance of a well run business. These are the impressive results from Suncor Energy Inc’s stringent quality control program called Strive for Excellence, put in place seven years ago to monitor each Sunoco station’s performance.
The quality program is a critical competitive advantage for Suncor Energy as customer service was a key competitive advantage in the market. As pricing is similar from one petrol station to the next, retailers compete by differentiating their service, cleanliness and unique features.

The Challenge
The frontline of Suncor Energy’s quality program was held by its team of Territory Managers who were responsible for inspecting 15 to 20 petrol stations in their respective geographical area. The inspections gathered information to ensure each petrol station was adhering to Suncor Energy’s quality control standards. The quality control program was paper-based and each Territory Manager must complete a thorough 300-question checklist at each station to audit its performance. The inspection process was cumbersome and slow. Each Territory Manager ran through a checklist on paper, noted the results and later in their office, keyed in the data to Suncor Energy’s reporting system. Due to the sheer volume of work, the system was inefficient and it was common to have week-long delays between a Territory Manager reporting a problem and action being taken. Suncor Energy adopted the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) when it was introduced but the handhelds were non-wireless PDAs. Although the paperwork was
reduced, the process still lacked timeliness and information immediacy.

The Company
The Canadian Alberta province is home to the Athabasca Oil Sands, reputed to be one of the world’s largest petroleum resource basins covering 40,000 square kilometers and currently being developed by Suncor Energy. To the unfamiliar, oil sand is a mixture of both sand and other rock material which contains bitumen, a type of heavy oil. There are over one trillion barrels of bitumen to be mined from the Athabasca Oil Sands.