Cepsa Automates IT with Red Hat to Drive its Operational Efficiency

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Cepsa, a global energy and chemical company, has adopted an IT automation strategy to innovate faster and streamline operations. Working with Red Hat Consulting, Cepsa implemented Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and was able to increase operational efficiency by 35%, reduce IT response times by up to 15%, and free more than 6,000 work hours previously dedicated to repetitive IT tasks for more strategic work.

Cepsa is a leading international company committed to sustainable mobility and energy with strong technical expertise after more than 90 years of activity. It also has a global Chemicals business with world-leading positions and a progressive green plan. Recently, the company presented its strategy for 2030, ‘Positive Motion’, projecting its ambition to be a leader in sustainable mobility, biofuels, and green hydrogen in Spain and Portugal and a key benchmark in the Energy Transition. Cepsa puts customers at the heart of its activity and will work with them to help design and achieve their decarbonization efforts.

The company is constantly seeking to improve efficiency and to provide a better service to its employees, partners and end consumers. With this goal in mind, Cepsa reinforced its digital transformation strategy in 2019 by creating a hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat OpenShift to facilitate the deployment of digital services with greater speed and agility.

Cepsa started its automation journey by carrying out some basic automation tasks in a pilot and quickly realized its operational benefits. Using Ansible Automation Platform, Cepsa has automated its infrastructure, including operating systems, servers, storage and virtualisation. IT automation has become essential for the execution of credentials and security features, as new cybersecurity policies require the company to keep systems updated more frequently. In addition, it has been able to implement preset actions with Ansible Automation Platform so that in the event of an incident, teams can restart servers, minimizing downtime and the impact on its customers. Cepsa currently runs more than 400 automated processes, with the aim of developing more in the coming years.

A critical automation project for Cepsa has been the migration of its on-premises SAP Platform to SAP S/4 HANA in the AWS cloud. Ansible Automation Platform enabled Cepsa to automate processes that could be repeated as many times as necessary while reducing the margin of error caused by manual tasks. In two months, Cepsa migrated more than 60 servers from on-premises to the public cloud.

At Cepsa, like an increasing number of organizations, automation isn’t just a technology, but also a mindset. Cepsa collaborated with Red Hat Consulting to establish a tailored automation strategy across the organization. Working with Red Hat, Cepsa introduced DevOps methodologies to help inject a cultural change. Cepsa worked with its teams to spread a culture of automation, help them understand the advantages and foster greater collaboration.

As a result of its shift to automation, Cepsa’s IT department can now work more independently to automate tasks, invest more time in innovative projects of greater business value to customers and reduce IT response times by up to 15%. Partners, such as service stations, also benefit from faster troubleshooting; for example passwords can now be reset within five minutes, whereas before waiting time could be more than 30 minutes.

Supporting Quotes

Julia Bernal, country manager, Spain and Portugal, Red Hat
"Cepsa is an excellent example of the potential for digital transformation in the energy industry and beyond - using technology to deliver new innovation faster, and just as importantly, to reinforce the agile ways of working and culture of automation that will enable them to deliver even more for their customers and partners. We’re thrilled to collaborate with them to help enable this transformation." 

Francisco José Martín Pérez, automation manager, Cepsa
"Red Hat is a strategic partner of Cepsa. We achieved greater economic and operational efficiency. We use technology and research to be more competitive, optimise processes and improve the efficiency and quality of our products, and Red Hat has been instrumental in helping us generate value from IT automation."