How IOCL is using advanced technologies for making DBT meaningful

IOCL markets LPG products, the majority of it in the form of gas cylinders, under the brand name Indane through 9000 customer touch points. In order to keep track of the various outlets, it has developed an in-house software solution to digitize transaction processing on the dealer side. Alok Khanna, Executive Director – Information Systems, Indian Oil talks about how the company is adopting latest technologies for simplifying its processes so as to serve its vast customer base in an efficient manner.

By Ankush Kumar

PSUs today are leveraging IT to automate business processes across various functions such as engineering, manufacturing, materials management, production, site operations, project management, etc. IOCL, off-late has been continuously implementing newer technologies for bringing efficiency and transparency in its system. The leading PSU oil company has recently partnered Freecharge – a digital platform provider, to allow its customers in making cashless payments against LPG cylinder deliveries across the country.

Indian Oil is the biggest downstream PSU Oil company of India having annual sales of 76.5 million tonnes of petroleum products in 2014-15. It has ten refineries, countrywide network of 9500 km long pipelines and 400 plus Oil terminals and LPG plants.

This itself summarizes the scale of business on which the company operates and also states its complex IT requirements. Alok Khanna, who is the executive director – Information Systems at Indian Oil along with his team is responsible for the company’s IT needs like ERP operations, software development, procurement of hardware, network, security management, business process management for IOCL consisting of ten refineries, pipeline division, 700 plus operating locations serving over 50000 direct bulk consumers as well as over 50000 dealers serving 200 million customers of petroleum products across the country.

Indian Oil’s network of over 45,000 customer touch-points reaches petroleum products to every nook and corner of the country. These include more than 25,000 petrol & diesel stations, including 6,200 Kisan Seva Kendra outlets (KSKs) in the rural markets. Over 9400 fuel stations across 55 cities are now fully automated. Indane LPG cooking gas reaches the doorsteps of 8.5 crore households through a network of 9144 distributors.

Managing such a vast network and ensuring transparency in the system is a massive task. “We have built a framework that supported the identification of the entitled government subsidy and transfer them directly into the consumers’ bank account,” shares Khanna.

IOCL markets LPG products, the majority of it in the form of gas cylinders, under the brand name Indane through 9000 customer touch points. In order to keep track of the various outlets, it has developed an in-house software solution to digitize transaction processing on the dealer side.

Almost every household in India uses gas cylinders and they were being sold at dual prices, informs Khanna. “The first task was to eliminate this from the market and this was established through a national scheme called PAHAL. Under this scheme, the product was offered at market price and the intended government subsidy would reach the customer’s bank account directly from the LPG service provider. This would be facilitated by the Aadhaar card as brought forward by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).”

By leveraging most of the existing in-house developed Indsoft software platform and retaining the “batch” plus “real time” processing with same code base, IOCL built a framework which supported the identification of the entitled government subsidy and transfer them directly into the consumers’ bank account. This platform also enabled other government schemes like “Give it up” & “Ujjwala”

On the LPG distributor network side, the architecture synchronizes the distributor end with the central server and exchange data in near real-time. The transactions are based on the web service request – response mechanism. On the transparency front, all the data are now available in the public domain and is accessible to the customers.

“Various analytic reports have been developed for stakeholders by deploying business intelligence tools to provide data in the form of data visualization, graphics for easier monitoring and controls,” informs Khanna. The DBTL scheme of Government of India has been recognized as the world’s “Largest Cash Transfer Benefit Program” (per the “Guinness Book of World Records”), with direct benefit transfers affecting more than 160 million households.

India’s largest commercial enterprise – IOCL is also working on procuring a COTS dealer management solution and a CRM solution for the 50000 plus secondary dealers of the company. The COTS dealer management solution is going to ultimately replace the strategic business unit (SBU) specific applications and all SBUs will operate on a single platform.

The CRM solution will be implemented across all SBUs and will cater the customer relationship management functions like lead management, master data management, complaint management, grievance redressal system, loyalty management, campaign management, sales force automation, multi-channel interaction & social media integration.

Elucidating on the use of emerging technologies and its implementations Khanna explains that IOCL is resorting to cloud services wherever required in order to bring agility in processes. “Several of our applications are hosted on private cloud. The proposed Dealer Management System and CRM are also going to be hosted on a private cloud.” IOCL is also exploring implementation of technologies like machine learning/ AI, ChatBots, IoT to enhance efficiency in various processes.