Valero Energy Corporation is the largest oil refining company in North America. It had 17 refineries in the United States, Canada, and Aruba; approximately 5,800 retail and branded wholesale outlets in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean, and refining capacity of 3.1 million barrels per day. Their challenge was to grow rapidly, quickly achieve acquisition synergies, improve decision making information for acquired operations, speed up generation of month-end closing statements, attain near total accuracy of performance figures and enable viewing of total company inventory at any time.

Valero Energy Corporation selected SAP because of its ability to provide a central hub for managing all interfaces and Web services, power to serve as a single integration & development platform for nearly all of Valero's business, capability to integrate SAP® and non-SAP software systems, support for synchronous & asynchronous messaging and enterprise approach to process integration.

The benefits after implementing SAP solutions and services were:

• Allowed acquisitions to continue without IT gridlock
• Expanded access to Web and enterprise services
• Achieved consistency in methods for using services
• Improved information for making business decisions
• Provided real-time visibility of orders, shipments, and inventories
• Increased collaboration among in-house developers
• Increased system reliability and reduced complexity