In accordance with a senior executive, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), the country's largest refiner, has embarked on a major data-driven digitalisation drive to optimise its crude purchase, refinery operations, and financial management, which has helped boost its efficiency and bottom line.

"What we've started doing is using the enormous data available to us to drive our decisions," Manish Grover, executive director (strategic information systems), Indian Oil Corporation, explained.

Every day, IOC generates a sea of data from its operations, which include refineries, pipelines, petrol pumps, aviation fuel stations, natural gas networks, and petrochemicals.

“We operate refineries at ten locations as a group. We deal with as many as 400 types of neat crude at a time. Crude is imported at three ports and then transferred to various refineries, most of which are landlocked. In this complex exercise, we end up dealing with as many as 12,000 variants of crude mixes at a time," said Grover. “And then you have exigencies created by the war which requires you to take quick decisions for crude purchases at high sea and quicker unloading schedule for them.”

Grover stated that the goal is to improve yields and reduce interruptions, adding that each day of refining interruption could result in a loss of Rs 200-300 crore in sales. According to him, the firm's new digital architecture helps "predict what can go wrong and help us act to prevent that."