“Which oil?” To market lubricants successfully, oil companies need to answer their customers’ question: “which oil for my equipment?”
To do this effectively requires:
knowledge of the current OEM specifications
matching oil company products to:
a) the OEM specification b) the appropriate market channels
up to date technical, sales and marketing information
a flexible, adaptable database
OATS meets that challenge! The EARL System, the leading lubricant recommendation database, provides the vital link between the oil companies and the OEM recommendations.
The EARL Systemenables an oil company to match their products to the right channels. And create value-added, channel-specific solutions for marketing, sales and technical staff – for example: recommendation books, websites, lube charts or surveys.
Traditionally many oil companies created for themselves the sort of services that OATS offers: keeping in touch with many OEMs, gathering information and publishing it internally. But now the costs have grown too great. Creating new services is too expensive. Relying on key suppliers, like OATS, is more cost-effective.
“I have worked with OATS for over 10 years and have always found them to be a reliable, proactive, customer-focused supplier”.
“OATS has helped us gain new business and retain current customers with simple and flexible solutions and has allowed us to work in a more efficient manner in this field”.
“It’s crucial that our customers, wherever they are in the world, are using the right lubricants – and that’s where OATS comes in”.
OATS has specialised in matching how EARL recommendations are delivered to the rapidly diversifying operational channels used by the world’s leading oil companies. This short series of slides illustrates this concept.
OATS now offers solutions at all levels – from a simple “local/national” requirement to a complete global infrastructure solution.
1. Matching OATS’ products to market evolution
EARL was launched in 1995 into a single language, single country, traditionally-structured marketplace.
As the market has changed over time, each subsequent generation of EARL has evolved to meet the developing sophistication of the lubes industry, at the same time exploiting advances in computer technology. A key objective has always been to retain EARL’s ease of use in a context of rapidly expanding data and software sophistication. With the growth of the internet, OATS has adapted its products to provide national web, and subsequently, global infrastructure solutions.
2. Lubricants infrastructure solutions
There are three broad categories of user for EARL data; the public, trade partners/distributors plus company sales forces and, finally the company’s lubricants experts. This chart shows how EARL provides different routes to the lubricant recommendations, using the most appropriate technology to deliver the data. The following three charts then show each of these three processes in more detail.
OATS manages over 100 websites in many languages.
3. Public access example: B2C Internet
Most oil companies wish to promote their products to their customers by using a link from the customer’s vehicle or equipment name to the branded lubricant recommendations.
A typical multinational oil company will operate on a regional basis with several countries and languages controlled by a regional hub.
EARL can support a single public-access website for this regional scenario, where individual motorists can select their own language and view grades that are available in their market – often with a choice of up to three quality levels.
4. Partner, distributor and sales access: B2B Extranet
Sales teams often need access to lubricants recommendations and other information on a selective basis.
With much of the sales function devolved to distributors in some companies, the requirement is to give them access to the same level of information as is needed by the company’s own sales force. EARL Online provides this access as a B2B Extranet system. In addition, there is a full survey system that can be shared between many users in different locations.
5. In-house access: Intranet
This model for distributing EARL data within an oil company not only covers the traditional lubes recommendations but also shows how legacy data and locally-sourced information can be integrated.
Oil company subscribers to EARL can supplement the extensive OATS data with their own locally entered information or can add their existing proprietary data. This is easily done using GUS, OATS’ Global entry and Updating System.
6. Global infrastructure system diagram
This composite chart is a representation of a complete global infrastructure solution, in which all the EARL CD, Internet (B2C) and Extranet (B2B) elements are involved to meet each of these varied requirements.
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