Britain kept on the move

THE SHELL-MEX and BP Group markets, in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the products of the Shell and BP Groups of Companies. The Group supplies oil products for use in transport; fuels for the home and the factory; lubricants and fuels for ships, aeroplanes and machinery; and many other products besides.

The products are distributed throughout the country to factories, farms, garages, airports, docks and private homes, and in order to carry out this job the Group has 2,500 lorries, 5,500 rail tank cars, and 25 ships. Also, through the British Pipeline Agency, it operates a pipeline service for the oil industry.

Forty thousand transactions every weekday have to be dealt with and in order that the Group can run its marketing, distribution and financial activities efficiently it uses the latest types of transport, up-to-date marketing techniques, and — very important as far as Hemel Hempstead is concerned — advanced, modern, high-speed computers.

In Hemel Hempstead the Group has its Southern Computer Centre, where two large and powerful computers — the UNIVAC 1108 and the UNIVAC 1106 — are taking on more and more of the data processing requirements of this Group with a thousand million-a-year turnover.

The computers have a large task ahead of them. They must take over from the present computers all of the work involved in producing statistics for management; accounting and invoicing; payrolls and personnel records; and help the Group in its process of keeping abreast of the developments of the marketing and management techniques of the Seventies.

This supplement tells you a little about how a large computer is installed, and about the people who operate it. But installation is only the beginning — much more has to be done before any computer really gets down to the job of using its great capabilities of speed and accuracy for the improvement of the efficiency organisation.

Taken from an "Advertisement Feature" in a local paper. Date unknown, but probably early 1970's