Dr HS Paul
NEW DELHI, May 3: As the world fights the Covid-19 pandemic, corporates are increasingly relying on digital technology in dealing with the new normal.
For Indian Oil too, digital technology has emerged as the fulcrum around which the entire organization is functioning seamlessly to maintain the supply line of essential fuels, with minimal disruptions.
In the past 37 days of the national lockdown, the Corporation has taken many new measures to deal with the changed work environment and new customer requirements. For instance, the LPG supply and distribution software had to be primed to its full potential to deal with the sharp rise in cooking gas demand from households during the lockdown period.
For the benefit of its 13.11 crore LPG customers, IndianOil had been putting in place several convenient modes of refill booking from home, like SMS-IVRS, WhatsApp, digital payment websites and online refill booking through mobile apps. This way, about 25 lakh customers are able to book for LPG refills every day from the comfort of their homes and take delivery of LPG refill cylinders at their doorsteps. This has also helped reduce the burden on the State/district administrations and law-and-order machinery in policing the lockdown. The Corporation has also been encouraging LPG customers to make digital payments to avoid unnecessary handling of currency notes in view of Covid-19. The LPG emergency helpline number 1906 has also been kept operational.
Indian Oil’s LPG distributors are making refill deliveries on priority to LPG customers from BPL households under Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY), for whom the Government of India has extended the facility of three LPG refills free of cost during April, May and June 2020. The robust software developed for implementation of PMUY has enabled the Corporation to transfer the RSP for the first LPG refill directly into the bank accounts of 3.47 crore PMUY customers on its rolls, amounting to Rs. 2,724 crore within a few days. Introduction of e-receipts for customers and invoice register in the software were the other innovations.
Considering the criticality of maintaining fuel supplies, especially LPG for households and petrol and diesel for emergency/essential/exempted services, from a countrywide network of 600 plus locations, IndianOil is running all its data centres on a 24×7 basis with 100 per cent uptime for all business-critical applications, including SAP ERP software.
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