Transforming Energy Retail | K.S. Shetty, Director, HPCL | Times Drive Auto Summit & Awards

Thank you, Prashant, first of all for having me on your show. This visit to Stockholm was part of the Swedish Institute Global Management Program, which I attended in 2012. But believe me, some of the things which we saw and learned there, we immediately got to implement when we came back to India. We got an opportunity to implement at HPCL specifically. Some of the things were like the first sustainable development report that we did. We've also made plans about how to be transitioned to a net zero company at that time itself, in terms of zero waste utilization, net zero water utilization. So all of these things were some of the things which actually came into our business plans. Those things which were novelty then are now today a way of life at HPCL, and we are happy that 12 years down the line we have made a good journey into becoming a very sustainable company.

We have a very simple strategy for talent acquisition at HPCL, and that is what we call as build, buy, or borrow. For many of our core businesses like refining and marketing, what we do is we build our talent from bottom up. We hire young engineers and then we train them, develop them, and they go on to important positions in the organization. But the second thing is that we are also a company which is growing, and we are actually growing in different areas like petrochemicals, renewables, gas—things like that where we don't have ready-made talent. So in some of these areas we have bought the talent. Somewhere we have also had mid-level recruitments, like in our research and development. HPCL has one of the fastest-growing R&D centers at Bangalore, and we're very proud of that—not only CPSCs but even I'm talking about both the private and public sector. There's a lot of cutting-edge research which is happening there, and we have actually brought in a lot of new talent at the lateral levels. And third is, of course, there are aspects of our business which we want to grow very fast and we want to import certain aspects. We've just implemented the SAP S/4HANA system, which is one of the most advanced SAP systems in the world. For that we actually brought in some consultants to handhold us, and our teams worked with them to implement those solutions. So post-COVID, what we have done is we have taken this three-prong strategy to actually accelerate our talent acquisition and processes at our corporation.

What we are very proud of is actually the affirmative action policy which is there at HPCL. So while some may say that this is a presidential directive and this is a government mandate, we are very proud that we have been able to include various sections of society and make them part of our growth story. So if you were to ask me that one thing, then probably it is this affirmative action.

Absolutely. One thing which comes to mind is digital absorption. Pre-COVID, there was a directive for us to make our colonies smart and to increase digital penetration amongst our employees and also in our ecosystem. But post-COVID, the digital expansion and the absorption of digital in various processes across our—you heard just about our Director Marketing, about every drop of fuel, right from our port to our retail outlets, and from retail outlets to our customer, we are able to track every drop of fuel, how it is happening. And not just that, even our HR processes or all other business processes—the digital absorption has been phenomenal. I think looking back, this has been one of the positive things which has come out of this particular challenge that was posed to us.