1. Summary Objective: To design and conduct training intervention for the operations team of Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd., a giant public sector and a fortune 500 listed company. In operations team of HPCL there exists a job profile of a planning officer. A planning officer plays a key role in servicing the clients (retail - petrol pump outlets, also called dealers). HPCL through its client turnover analysis came to a conclusion that it's 10% of dealers gave them more than 50% of the revenue. So at a senior level a policy was designed to give these top 10%, ‘A’ category dealers, preferential services. The objective of Wisdom Solutions was to survey, design, customize & conduct a training intervention that will help the planning officers to become attitudinally open & ready to offer the preferential services to ‘A’ category dealers.

2. Our approach

Our training & research team met the DGM Operations, HPCL, to know his challenges, expectations & objective behind designing the training solution.

Further we visited the HPCL terminal, where the planning officers operate & perform their duties in stressful conditions. A terminal is a place where the petrol pump owners sent their trucks to load petrol, diesel or kerosene or all.

We met the planning officers, their comrades - sales officers and got the questionnaires filled by them. Another meeting was arranged with Chief Installation Officer & Regional Manager, the heads of planning officers & sales managers respectively. We got some brilliant inputs from their experiential sharing & real time situations which result in conflict between both the officers.

We got some real life scenarios of planning & sales officers. We used these scenarios in designing the case studies.

The Making of Collaborative Skills workshop for HPCL

Role of the Planning Officers Most of the times, the planning officers need to handle ill mannered & nasty truck drivers. Under stressful conditions they have to politely answer their irate clients, who are ready to blast at a drop of a feather. And they had to do all this while planning daily for 80 - 120 trucks that move in the radius of 100 -200 kilometers to deliver the product. Apart from that, they have to handle customer complaints related to product quality & quantity & pilferages that may happen during the transit of a product. The problems worsen when their comrades, sales officers, also threatened them to service their clients from the word 'go'. Instead of getting empathy from their comrades the planning officers got misunderstood & fired.

3. Background of HPCL HPCL is a Fortune 500 company, is one of the major integrated oil refining and marketing

companies in India. It is a Mega Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) with Navaratna status. It has an annual turnover of Rs. 1,16,428 Crores and sales/income from operations of Rs 1,31,802 Crores (US$ 25,618 Millions) during FY 2008-09, having about 20% Marketing share in India and a strong market infrastructure. HPCL also owns and operates the largest Lube Refinery in the country producing Lube Base Oils of international standards, with a capacity of 335 TMT. This Lube Refinery accounts for over 40% of the India's total Lube Base Oil production. HPCL's vast marketing network consists of 13 Zonal offices in major cities and 90 Regional Offices facilitated by a Supply & Distribution infrastructure comprising Terminals, Aviation Service Stations, LPG Bottling Plants, and Inland Relay Depots & Retail Outlets, Lube and LPG Distributorships. HPCL, over the years, has moved from strength to strength on all fronts.

4. Our Team From our end 2 senior trainers, Mr.Nitin Ahir & Mr.Amit Kaulagekar & 2 assistant trainers were involved from meeting the senior management of operations, planning officers, to designing the questionnaires & case studies to conducting the program & post workshop follow up.

5. The Problem "Preferential Services" to ‘A’ category dealers was an additional load to the already overloaded planning officers. In this stressful scenario the new policy demanded to serve these high selling dealers special treatment. As per the new policy hotline phone connections was given to all the ‘A’ category dealers so that their complaints, queries & re-ordering of the products could be done in a faster manner. The problem was the behavior of the planning officers. These 40+ aged planning officers had developed a habit of speaking in a rough manner, as they had to deal with the ill mannered transporters or with the representatives of the dealers, who came to the terminal to load the product. Now these officers had to polish their communication, get into a relationship of trust &

understanding with their fellow sales officers, be polite in handling complaints & overall offer solutions to all of them.

6. Outcomes & Impact A solution in the form of a two day workshop called as Collaborative Skills was designed, customized & conducted for the planning officers. The learning's of the workshop have helped the officers in…

Making them ready to give preferential services to ‘A’ category dealers Handling stress Understanding different types of people & behaving & communicating accordingly Understanding how to bring fulfillment in relationships Resolving conflicts Implementing thought force in business Learning to look from other's glasses / perspective

7. Improvement in workshop During the workshop we found scenarios that suggested we should take up few initiatives to make workshop more effective.

Some of the terminals were automated, some semi-automated & some non-automated. So the roles & challenges of planning officers differed as per the automation of the terminals. So few case studies were not relevant to few of the planning officers. So we visited some other terminals of which were not automated to make few our case studies more realistic.

Few of the officers had come with an expectation that in the workshop all the senior management of HPCL operations team would come to address them about the do's & don'ts & additional information about serving ‘A’ category dealers. They were surprised to see some external faculty conducting the workshop. So in upcoming workshops an official mail will be sent by HPCL to the all selected participants clearing the expectations & scope of the workshop.

Few senior members from the operations team will be requested to attend the workshop. During the workshop, in one of the discussions the participants came up with amazing solutions to some of the persistent challenges faced by them. So these solutions will definitely help the senior members in creating / updating some policies or in taking some important decisions.

In the workshop we observed that majority of the officers were 40 + aged. We were not informed about age category of these officers.

8. Learning and Development Consultants

Wisdom Solutions team is pleased to design and implement the Collaborative Skills workshop for the planning and sales officers of HPCL. For designing any learning and development interventions for your organization please contact Mr. Sanjay Bodani on 90110.20850 or drop a mail on sanjay@wisdom-solutions.com