Refining Information Systems with its plethora of tech ologies plays a vital role in a company’s day-to-day activities and oil refineries are no exception. Oil companies have traditionally remained in the forefront while adoption new technology. The North Eastern refineries have also thrived to be in the technology forefront by adopting latest developments in the Information Technology and Communications. Considerable investments have been made in the IT communication infrastructure by all the refineries. The Northeast refineries in Digboi, Guwahati and Bongaigaon started their IT forays by developing and implementing stand alone applications in the areas of Finance, Materials, sales etc. While these applications could take care of the short term IT requirements, they could not cater to the information requirement in the changed competitive environments. With the dismantling of APM (Administrative Pricing Mechanism) the efficiency of the Oil companies became very important for the survival. Coupled with the re-alignment of market players in the Oil Sector, the need came for an integrated approach towards IT. All the three refineries today have an integrated IT system through the use of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).
ERP is a structured approach to optimizing a company’s internal value chain.
ERP helps the company manage its important functions like production, sales & distribution, inventory & material management, plant maintenance, finance and human resource management. ERP consists of a multi-module application, which allows data to flow from one module to the other. It therefore not only integrates the business processes, but also offers intelligent information by correlating data from various modules.
Information Technologies and its applications are strategic to a business whereas telecomm and network infrastructure are strategic to Information Technology. Therefore, for any IT implementation, it is very essential that it has a proper telecomm and network infrastructure in place. This in fact was the major bottleneck in implementing IT solutions in the northeast refineries. But now with a variety of network products available in the market and BSNL also offering a variety of telecomm services, this is no longer a constraint.
Technology utilization in a North-East Oil refinery:
Numaligarh Refinery is the newest of the four of the NE refineries. Since its inception, NRL has adopted the latest technologies in the areas of process plants, DCS, TAS and Information Technology. Its process plants are based on technology from USA, Denmark and France.
NRL has always remained forefront while absorbing latest technologies. NRL was the first Oil Company in India to implement full suite of ERP application. NRL adopted ERP solution in the year 1998. The communication network consists of state of the art LAN (local Area Network), WAN (Wide Area Network) consisting of leased lines, V-SATs, Vo-IP (Voice Over IP), LAN and WAN. VPN (Virtual Private Network) is used as a secure access media for the information systems through Internet.
Recently NRL has implemented the full suite of SAP R/3 in 5 months. The end-to-end implementation duration of 5 months is a record time for such a large-scale implementation of SAP base modules and the industry solution IS-OIL.
Numaligarh Refinery has been able to achieve major benefits through the use of Information and Communication Technology.
- Software developed in the area of OPC (OLE for process control) has made process monitoring very easy. The important process parameters are monitored for greater plant availability. The in-house developed software makes available the plant aberrations to the user’s desktops through mails.
- The OPC software has also helped NRL in the areas of pollution control. NRL is the first Oil refinery in India to display on-line the environment related parameters like NOX, SOX. These parameters can be properly monitored as any violation of the norms is brought to the notice of the relevant personnel through automatic mail.
- At the Marketing Terminal, state of the art Terminal Automation System (TAS) has been installed to affect the dispatches both through road and rail. The TAS solution was imported from M/s Alstom, France and adopted in the year 2000. The TAS is seamlessly integrated with the ERP System to enable operation and business processes work in tandem. Terminal automation system is administered by “LOAD RACK COMPUTER” (LRC) system based on Unix platform with Oracle as back-end. The Terminal Automation System and its interface with SAP R/3 has made it possible to adopt Engine on Load concept in railway dispatches. Because of adoption of this concept the end-to-end loading time of railway rakes is very low. This has helped in the better utilization of the precious railway resource. - With the adoption of new SAP R/3, the tight monitoring of fuel and losses has been made possible. Fuel and losses is a parameter, which has got a major bearing the profitability of Oil Company. - Integrated IT approach has helped us in innovative treasury management and thereby reducing our interest burden. - With the implementation of the SAP R/3 we expect to achieve major benefits in the areas of inventory optimization, plant availability, better internal and external customer satisfaction. Apart from usage in marketing endeavors, the implementation is expected to bring in major benefits to the organization in the various areas of operations besides ensuring optimum utilization of resources. - There are many other areas of IT like ARS (Attendance Recording System), Laboratory Information System that have brought in major benefits to the organization. The ARS system, which is directly linked to SAP R/3, has brought in proper utilization of manpower. Resource allocation for areas of IT has never been a constraint for NRL as the Return on Investment is very high for Information Technology projects.
Conclusion:
The North East Refineries including NRL have adopted major initiatives for using IT and Communication for enhancing productivity and profitability. There are many other areas in IT, which are yet to be explored by the North East refineries. As all the four refineries are in common software platform i.e. SAP R/3, development of a common pool of knowledge base will help in the areas of resource optimization. As all the oil refineries spend considerably in the areas of ICT (Information and Communication technology), there is ample of scope for local entrepreneurs making use of these opportunities. The adoptions of modern technologies in these areas will not only help the refineries but will also contribute towards development of NE region.
Source: Various articles & press releases.
By Roshmi Choudhury, Numaligarh,
Assam
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