BPCL Moves 20 Million Records from Legacy To

BPCL moves 20 million records

Microsoft .Net Framework from legacy to .NET application in Case study 30 days

Bharat Petroleum Corporation’s LPG Division had a legacy “Developing an application in application which stored all the master records of all its just 30 days to migrate a large, consumers across the country. Based on the COBOL – UNIX mission critical application is no platform, the solution had become archaic and cumbersome, mean feat. We could not have which led the organization to evaluate its technology options. achieved this on any other While evaluating platform’s for migration, it found that .NET’s platform but .NET. We did strength’s combined with Microsoft SQL Server would offer the evaluate other platforms but did best cost-benefit advantage to the organization. Also, it has been not think it would meet our benchmarked for scalability and would be able to handle the requirements for this particular organization’s growth. application.”

R P Singh Reducing the development time dramatically, BPCL has been Executive Director , IIS BPCL able to move its master database and related applications online on to its intranet. Not just this, with better manageability and access to information, the organization is in the process of using the data to reconcile inventory and financials, by linking the information to the SAP solution. This application has moved from being a defunct repository of data to the very backbone of the organization’s IT applications.

In the near future, it will be able to mine the data to effectively target sales and marketing campaigns, new product launches and distributor promotions. With .NET the organization has made a leap from legacy to future proof application in 30 days!

CUSTOMER PROFILE BUSINESS SITUATION SOLUTION BENEFITS Bharat Petroleum's LPG The master database With these problems in mind, . Immediate Access to division is one of the largest application had several the company decided to create information suppliers of LPG in India. drawbacks. An ageing legacy a new application which would . Scalable Reliable Platform Named Bharatgas, the product solution was constrained by be state-of-the art. This . Reduces Development & Test is sold in the home and expensive hardware, time application has been built on Cycle industrial segment either in consuming software the Microsoft .NET platform to cylinders or piped gas. The maintenance and lack of skilled future proof the organization’s . Effective Data Transformation company has over 20 million manpower. Additionally, the investment in technology. The Services consumers across the country, organization was unable to use objective is to create several . Components helps reduce that are serviced through 1900 the data stored in the applications which will use the writing fresh code distributors. application for business and master database to provide key . Protects Technology market intelligence. information which can be used Investments by various departments.

What it had instead was an ageing legacy “Upon evaluating various solution, hindered with expensive Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. technologies such as Oracle, hardware, cumbersome software (BPCL), established in 1976 by the Linux and MySQL, we found maintenance and waning COBOL skills. Government of India, is among the top Also, the long processing time and manual Microsoft .NET in conjunction three petroleum refining and marketing intervention in the master database with SQL Server would allow us companies in India. Its net sales in 2002-03 updation was adding to its technical woes. to meet our current and future was Rs 502.16 billion ($ 10.5 billion). The At this point the IS department decided to requirements at the lowest cost company currently has 22 per cent share of migrate the older application as well as of ownership. The ease of the petroleum products market, and 11 per transfer of the master records. This would development and use were the cent share of petroleum refining capacity in enable better management of data and other reasons to migrate to the India. almost certainly yield better business Microsoft platform. The LPG SBU of BPCL is responsible for intelligence in the future. Dr U V Girish Kumar the sales and distribution of the LPG used In the legacy system, accessing any DGM , IS Applications in the domestic as well as commercial BPCL intelligent information from the data was a segments. With approximately 2 crore (20 long process. Fresh code had to be written million) consumers, the LPG SBU services to process a query to get the relevant its urban and rural homes, and industrial information. customers. Another key problem faced on a month on The LPG SBU works through a network of month basis was the time consuming 1900 distributors across the country process of updating the master records. coordinated by 46 territories. The Each month, on an average half a million organization needed to track, monitor and new records are created at the distributor update new connections released across the locations. To update this information into country, approximately five lakh (half a the master records used to take more than 3 million) records each month, often in days. Often error debugging could lead to a excess of Rs 18 crores or US $3.75 million. cascade of delays and backlogs. To manage this large volume of data, the organization required a stable, robust web- based database application.

MAIN MENU Territories can push new data directly to the server or view the latest reports online

The master database updates did not have the requisite technology “ features or support to meet all its has become an online, self Identifying the right technology requirements. sustaining process. What used platform to take a minimum of 3 days “We were not sure how we would migrate earlier has become a 3 hours One of the key areas during the migration data from COBOL into MySQL and could process, with minimal manual process was to identify an appropriate not find support on it. Issues such as intervention.” technology platform. The platform had to support and technology roadmap made us be scalable and robust with minimal move away from open source to a future Ms P. Rajeswari downtime, as this application would host proofed technology platform,” explains Dr. Chief Manager, IS, Special Projects BPCL the master data for the entire SBU with U V Girish Kumar, DGM IS, BPCL. over 20 million records. Therefore, it was decided to migrate the Secondly, BPCL also wanted a solution application using Microsoft platform. with a long term technology roadmap to The Implementation Process replace its legacy system. This technology would form the backbone of its LPG The implementation was preceded by a business for the next decade or more. complete study of the previous system. “The previous system had been created The third consideration was to find a years ago and we had to reverse engineer solution which would allow easy access to to understand how the application worked. the data, with capabilities to mine data into This was necessary for us to develop the business intelligence in the future. All this architecture for the new application,” would have to be done with minimal comments P Rajeswari, Chief Manager IS, development effort. BPCL. The IT team evaluated Oracle and MySQL Once the IT Team had identified the for databases, apart from Microsoft SQL schematics and workflow of the Server and .NET combination and Linux at application, it undertook a BPR exercise to the operating system level. The team found see how the solution could be improved, that the price performance for Oracle streamlined and modified to meet the would make the solution far more current day and future requirements. With expensive than a Microsoft SQL Server, this goal in mind, the IT team interacted .NET solution; the MySQL-Linux combine closely with the end-users to understand

EASY TO USE, MANAGE

& UPDATE Territories can upload data and identify problem files with the click of a button. The IS team has an online view of any problems faced leading to faster resolution time their requirements. “Several reports being The files are uploaded by the Territories generated in the old system had become directly to the server after due obsolete and many could be combined. confirmation. This is to ensure consistency Therefore, in the new application, we were and accuracy of the data. In case there are able to bring the number of standard any problems with the data to be uploaded, Applications Statistics at a Glance reports down to 6 from 15,” explains K S the territory can upload the file under the Shanthi, Senior Programming Officer IS, ‘Problem DTNs section’, which is then Total No. of Master Records 20 Million BPCL. checked by the IS team. An online view of Record Updates Per Month 5,00,000 all the data uploaded makes it possible for BPCL also trained its developers on .NET the organization to track the data receipt. No. of distributors 1900 and SQL Server to ensure that the requisite skills were available in-house. Based on “ The upload of data to the server has On-line upload 46 locations the feedback and the results of the become a fairly simple activity with the Business Process Reengineering exercise, help of .NET. Currently, we have some Development time 1 month it broke down the application development manual interventions, so as to ensure that and migration process into three steps: data is validated centrally. But as the territories get accustomed to the new Migration of data into SQL Server system, the application will take over the The migration of data was the most critical process completely,” explains S K aspect of the application. To move data Subramanian , Manager IS, BPCL. from COBOL, some modifications had to be made to the legacy application so that SQL Server’s Data Transformation Services could be used effectively. The Microsoft .NET has provided the IS modifications included creating end of Department of BPCL with an ideal record characters in the master database. platform to develop applications that can Once this was done, SQL’s DTS services be easily accessed through the intranet to automatically transferred the records from track the activities and provide valuable the legacy application. information to the various functions within “The DTS services in SQL Server were a the organization be it sales, marketing or big help to us, as we were able to transfer finance the information without any unnecessary delays,” explains P Sudarsanam, Senior Immediate Access to Information Programming Officer, BPCL. Access to relevant information is now “With .NET, we can now create .NET Application to Automate available over the intranet. While standard new applications and self help Information Upload from Territories reports are generated on a monthly basis, specific requests can be met faster too. query based applications which The next step was to use .NET to create an can be used by Sales, application that would allow upload from “ When we wanted details on the newly Marketing and Finance for the territories of the transaction records. launched product such as the 5 kg LPG better business planning and Using .NET Framework and ASP. NET, cylinder, we no longer needed to wait for decision making.” BPCL was able to create the application in days to get data. The IS department was able to provide the information within a Subramanian S K approximately 30 days. “We were able to few hours,” comments Mala Bhatia, Manager IS develop the application in 30 days because BPCL the .NET Framework and ASP.NET allows Manager, LPG Finance CO. faster development cycles,” says Priya Similarly, the BPCL sales team can access Sivakumar, Programming Officer, BPCL. information on new connections based on region, territory and drill down to the and when necessary,” comments distributor level. Radhakrishnan M, Territory Manager, Chennai LPG. Similar views are echoed by Microsoft® Windows 2000 Scalable Reliable Platform Microsoft SQL Server 2000 R Somasundaram, Territory Manager and VisualStudio.NET BPCL conducted an internal cost benefit S Prabhakaran, Operations Officer of analysis on the various platforms under Coimbatore LPG Plant. Hardware consideration. Based on this study, it was Xeon 2.0 GHz - single CPU , 512 Easy to build Plug-in applications obvious that the .NET Framework helps MB Cache, 2048 MB SDRAM , 8 build scalable and reliable applications at GB + 3 X 100 GB HDD With the new database and application in the lowest total cost of ownership. “During place, the IS team can concentrate on the evaluation process, we spoke with creating new applications with limited .NET users in other parts of the company development work. This will deliver new and received favourable feedback. This functionality, business intelligence and helped consolidate our view on the knowledge which can be used by the technology as well,” explains S K management to make more informed Subramanian Manager IS, BPCL. decisions. Reduced Development time Protects Technology Investments Microsoft .NET Framework and VisualStudio.NET allowed BPCL to code The .NET Framework enables applications the application in just 30 days. This would written in different programming have taken more than twice the time on any languages to integrate deeply with each other platform. other. “We are currently integrating this application with our SAP backend. This Detecting errors is much easier will give us better business and market Microsoft .NET Framework provides intelligence, which can be used internally,” integrated debugging and profiling tools says P. Rajeswari, Chief Manager IS, that make the test cycle much faster. BPCL. During the master database update process, Data Transformation Services the legacy solution would give errors without explaining the cause. This would Probably the biggest benefit that BPCL has take BPCL from a few hours to a few days accrued is in terms fetching data from the to resolve. “Now with the .NET legacy application and transferring it into application, debugging can be completed in the new database. This task alone could a couple of hours,” says Priya Sivakumar have taken months but was achieved in a Programming Officer IS, BPCL. few days.

End User Improves Productivity too

The functionality that the BPCL IT team has been able to offer has helped the territory employees to save many man- hours in collating and sending the relevant data to a central location. “With the new online solution, we are able to upload the information at our convenience. And the best thing is that we don’t have to wait until month end. We can upload the data as The Microsoft .NET Framework is a platform for building, deploying, and running XML Web services and applications. It provides a highly productive, standards-based, multi-language environment for integrating existing investments with next-generation applications and services as well as the agility to solve the challenges of deployment and operation of Internet-scale applications. The .NET Framework consists of two main parts: the common language runtime (CLR) and a hierarchical set of unified class libraries that includes a componentized version of Active Server Pages called ASP.NET, a loosely coupled data access subsystem (ADO.NET), and an environment for building rich Windows-based applications (Windows Forms).

For more information, please visit the .NET website at http://www. microsoft.com/net/

Software for the Agile Business

For more information about Microsoft products For more information about Bharat Petroleum © 2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights and services, call the Microsoft Sales Corporation Limited products and services, call reserved. Information Center at 1600 111100. To access +91-044-2620-3107 or visit the Web site at: This case study is for informational purposes information using the World Wide Web, go to: http://www.bharatpetroluem.com/ only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, http://www.microsoft.com/india/ EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, .NET, ASP.NET are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Final: May 2004