For customers whose operations depend on fuel being available and ready to perform at precisely the moment it is needed, delivery is only one part of the equation. Watson Fuels Chief Sales Officer Shaun Galvin tells Fuel Oil News why the company believes a more proactive approach to managing risk, resilience and fuel infrastructure is becoming increasingly important.
Ask Shaun Galvin what customer problem Watson Fuels was trying to solve when it began developing Watson One and he comes back to a single word.
“Assurance.”
It is a deceptively simple answer to a challenge that has become increasingly complex.
For decades, the conventional relationship between distributor and customer has largely begun with an order: fuel is required, the customer calls and the distributor delivers.
That model remains entirely appropriate for many customers and Shaun is clear that there will always be a place for it. But repeated supply disruption, energy-market volatility and the increasing business consequences of downtime are creating a very different requirement for others.
“The landscape, whether it’s fuel, whether it’s energy, and whether that is the physical supply of the fuel itself or the commercial exposures that sit around wholesale price, is a real challenge for customers across the board,” he says.
Watson One is the company’s response to these challenges.
Rather than being a reaction to one particular market event, Shaun says its development began as a response to the same theme increasingly cropping up in customer conversations: resilience.
Customers, particularly those operating business-critical infrastructure, wanted greater confidence that fuel would be available, fit for purpose and supported by a plan when circumstances moved outside business as usual. More fundamentally, they did not want the need to manage that uncertainty to distract them from their own operations.
The challenge, Shaun suggests, is effectively: make this something I do not need to worry about.
From fuel supply to fuel assurance
Watson One brings together a range of capabilities around the customer’s fuel requirements with the ambition of creating a single point of accountability.
“If I had to summarise what we are aiming to take responsibility for,” Shaun says. “I would say total fuel supply confidence.”
The initial focus includes sectors such as data centres, airports and facilities management – environments where loss of energy supply can have immediate and potentially serious consequences.
“Downtime is simply not an option for those sectors,” Shaun says.
That business-critical requirement changes the nature of the relationship.
Instead of beginning with the next delivery, the conversation may begin with the customer’s infrastructure, consumption pattern, contingency arrangements, fuel condition, monitoring, commercial exposure and appetite for risk.
The resulting solution will not, Shaun insists, be a standard package.
“Every single business, every customer, every site, the geographical constraints, their own desires and appetite for risk will all differ.”
Some of the individual capabilities to deliver such a solution, already existed within Watson Fuels. Shaun describes a long-standing “can do” culture that has frequently resulted in teams creating non-standard solutions when customers present unusual requirements.
Watson One brings more of that capability under one proposition.
At the same time, moving into markets with different requirements is creating new demands on Watson Fuels itself.
“As we’ve assessed markets that we’ve been less familiar with, we’ve uncovered requirements which have required investment our side to solve them,” he explains.
He expects that process to continue: “It’s going to be a product suite and a service line that evolves by the nature of its consultative approach with customers.”
Planning for the problem before it happens
At the heart of the proposition is a shift from reaction towards prevention and preparedness.
Shaun readily acknowledges that one of the key qualities of the distribution sector is its ability to respond to problems.
“We’re really good at reacting, I think, as an industry,” he says.
“But I think we would all be better served if we planned more effectively together all the way through that supply chain.”
With this in mind, Watson One is structured around planning, proactive management and response.
The first stage involves understanding the customer’s infrastructure and identifying where risk sits. That matters because what appear to be minor vulnerabilities can become significant at the exact time when a customer can least afford another problem.
Fuel quality in intermittent backup applications provides a particularly clear example.
A data centre may hold fuel for emergency generation for extended periods without routinely consuming it. By its nature, that reserve is called upon only when something else has already gone wrong. The longer fuel is stored, the greater the importance of monitoring its condition. If degraded fuel then prevents the backup system from performing when required, the customer does not simply have a fuel-quality problem.
It has another failure layered on top of the original event.
Something which could have been identified and addressed proactively may therefore become part of a much larger operational incident.
For Shaun, that demonstrates why resilience needs to be assessed as a system rather than through a single asset, delivery or fuel specification.
The resilience dividend
That thinking reaches well beyond Watson One.
Shaun believes there is a direct relationship between how businesses manage risk and their ability to withstand disruption: “The businesses that manage risk well are those that are more resilient and more sustainable, as well as more profitable – all the good metrics that you look to.”
Sustainability in this context has a broader meaning than carbon alone. It is about whether a business can continue operating through disruption, absorb unforeseen events and avoid preventable failures.
Recent years have given businesses repeated reminders of how quickly assumptions around supply, infrastructure and price can be challenged. Shaun believes planning for those possibilities is becoming a straightforward part of prudent business management.
“There’s definitely scope for more effective planning, both for events within an end user’s control and outside of their immediate control.”
A supplier that has encountered similar events elsewhere can also contribute experience a customer may not possess itself.
“We should be able to help inform customers of what those potential risks and threats are, because they may not have experienced them.”
In other words, experience gained in one crisis can potentially prevent another customer having to learn the same lesson first-hand.
Automation enabling people
Inevitably, greater visibility and proactive management bring technology into the conversation.
Telemetry can monitor tank levels. Data can identify patterns. Routine transactions can be automated. Modelling can support price-risk decisions and forecasting.
Shaun is enthusiastic about those possibilities, but clear about the purpose automation should serve. “There is absolutely a place for automation,” he says, “but more so than anything, so that talented humans can focus their time, effort and energy on what adds value.”
It is an important distinction.
The goal is not automation for its own sake. It is to remove work that technology can perform efficiently and consistently, leaving people free to apply experience, judgement and relationships to more complex situations.
“When it comes to studying risk, especially in technical, high-risk environments, there’s no replacement for human experience.”
That experience may come from having witnessed a particular failure, taken corrective action and then incorporated what was learned into future planning. And when an emergency does occur, all the plans and technology in the world still have to translate into action.
“You can have the best and most thorough plans documented for every possible contingency,” Shaun says, “but if you don’t have the right people who are equipped to make those plans and contingencies happen when you need them, you will struggle to make them a reality.”
He talks repeatedly about the “human grit” he sees within the Watson Fuels team – people willing to adapt, persevere and solve problems for customers.
The principle sits neatly alongside the company’s move towards greater local empowerment: technology provides visibility and consistency; people closest to the situation retain the capability to respond.
When the plan is tested
The value of resilience planning is ultimately revealed when something does go wrong.
For Watson One, Shaun says the response then has to be rapid.
What that response looks like will vary according to the incident and the contingencies already agreed, but the point of the preparatory work is that neither customer nor supplier begins from zero when the pressure is on.
“There’s someone there; they know, they understand, they’re competent, they’re ready to go and deliver.”
That matters in an industry built heavily on relationships.
In a business-critical moment, Shaun argues, the customer should not simply be an account number or another delivery destination. “You’ve done the planning, so you’ve got that comfort. You’ve worked through these contingencies, so you’re not having to think on the fly.”
The supplier already understands what sits beneath the requirement.
Commercial resilience too
Physical availability is only part of today’s fuel-risk equation.
Price volatility has brought commercial exposure firmly into the resilience conversation. Shaun believes the price of the product can be “just as volatile and unpredictable as access to the physical molecule”.
How much price certainty a customer wants will always depend on its own appetite for risk. Watson Fuel’s role, he stresses, is not to dictate that decision.
But for organisations seeking greater visibility over future fuel costs, price-risk management can form another part of the assurance proposition.
Asked whether customers increasingly want certainty over three things – that fuel will be there, that it will perform, and that its cost can be managed – Shaun is careful not to speak on behalf of every business.
But, he adds, “those three are a pretty good starting point”.
More than a traditional supplier
There is an obvious commercial objective behind Watson One. Shaun is, after all, Watson Fuels’s Chief Sales Officer.
The company wants both to deepen existing customer relationships and win business in new markets. But his definition of success extends beyond volumes and customer numbers.
“We want someone to come and challenge us to be more than a traditional fuel supplier,” he says.
The ambition is to become what he describes as “a resilient, trusted partner” and, particularly at business-critical moments, “an extension of their business”.
That represents an interesting evolution of a familiar distribution model.
Fuel remains at the centre. Watson Fuels continues to describe itself fundamentally as a liquid fuel supplier, and the customer remains responsible for deciding which fuel and energy pathway best suits its operation.
What changes is the value wrapped around that supply.
Expertise, monitoring, infrastructure knowledge, contingency planning, commercial risk management and rapid response all have the potential to make the distributor relationship about more than moving a litre from one location to another.
It is also one practical example of a wider question facing the sector: as markets change, how much future value will come not simply from supplying the product, but from applying the knowledge accumulated around supplying it?
For Shaun, the answer is clear enough to have built a new proposition around it.
But perhaps the most revealing description of Watson One came not from its list of services, but from his reference to customers who had remained insulated from difficult market events.
They were able to continue concentrating on their own operations because, as he puts it, they could think: “Those guys are in charge of that. We outsource that worry, that problem.”
For businesses where fuel failure can quickly become business failure, that may, ultimately, be the assurance that matters most.
Image courtesy of Watson Fuels