Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) : B2B process for “Oil Exchanges”

This project has been implemented by Indian Oil Corporation, India's largest

public sector petroleum company. It has been deployed at 23 different locations,

who sell products to BPCL and 13 locations of BPCL who sells products to IOCL.

IOCL as a part of its business process, transacts with BPCL for sale, purchase

and hospitality of petroleum products on a regular basis. It is not easy to keep

track of every transaction as it is spread across the country, and hence they

deployed this project. During the deployment phase, they faced some technical

and business challenges. These include ensuring full accounting of correct

quantities, preventing delays in signing JC's, monitoring SAP pricing procedure,

ensuring the rates are updated on time. The technical challenges were deploying

uniform middleware software across two SAP systems, configuration in SAP for

ALE/IDOC, output types, configuration of sub system Listener/port/RFC

destination, talking to SAP system, writing code for services, scaling

performance for handling full volume of transactions, etc. The deployment has

resulted in quite a few benefits. These include: quicker and transparent

inter-company settlement, better planning of exchanges and control over

placement and operation cost, elimination of paper-based joint certificate

exchange process by a electronic process involving open protocols, etc.. For

this project they have standardized the technology with x86_64 and Linux

platform, which would enable them to be vendor independent for mission critical

application also. Due to the use of open source software, IOCL has the freedom

of choosing the vendor for stability, reliable OS, plaform etc. The reason of

choosing SAP XI was that it provides ready-to-use content for rapid development

and deployment of process integration scenarios when integrating with SAP R/3.