The project was implemented by Indian Oil Corporation, which is India's
largest public sector petroleum company and is 116th on Fortune Global 500
listing 2008. This project is deployed at 23 different locations, who sell
products to BPCL and 13 locations of BPCL who sell products to IOCL. Both
companies transacts with each otherfor sale, purchase of petroleum products on a
regular basis. Keeping track of every transaction has always been difficult for
them as it is spread across the country. Earlier, there were chances of error
with the manual entry system, and it also led to lossand money. This is how they
felt the need of a system which can automate the transaction process and reduce
the number of errors.
Sh S Ramasamy, Executive Director(IS) |
To solve this issue, they have integrated their SAP implementations which are
considered among the largest in the country. As these two organizations have
their own standards to communicate within their organization, it was really
difficult and complex to integrate such systems. For example, one uses metric
ton as unit whereas the other uses kilo litre. And there was the neccessity of
the right conversion of units.
Company Scenario |
Before Deployment |
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After Deployment |
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Some technical and business challenges they have faced were; ensuring full
accounting of correct quantities, preventing delays in signing JC's, monitoring
the SAP pricing procedure, ensuring timely updates of rates , etc. Apart from
these, some technical challenges they faced were; deploying uniform middleware
software across two SAP system, 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. Benefits they have derived out of this project are quicker
and transparent inter-company settlement, better planning of exchanges, better
control over placement and operation cost, elimination of paper-based joint
certificate exchange process by an electronic process involving open protocols,
streamlining the supply chain performance and thereby benefiting all the parties
involved, and many more.
For this project, they have standardised the technology with x86_64 and Linux
platform, which enabled 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 scability, reliable OS, plaform etc. They have chosen
SAP XI as it provides ready-to-use content for rapid development and deployment
of process integration scenarios when integrating with SAP R/3.