Other Finalists : Indian Oil Corporation : Automated B2B Process Integration

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.

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.