Maximum Business Impact: Reliance Industries 

Thursday, June 08, 2006

The B2B portal created by the IT team of Reliance is meant to cater to the increasing customer demands. Reliance Industries is well known for its petro-chemical products business. For this, the company has an ecosystem of agents and channel partners through which it gets all its orders. Recently, Reliance also ventured into the petrol retail business. Orders for this business come through regional hubs, depots, and retail outlets. The company faced issues servicing customers as the volume of business grew, resulting in delays in servicing orders leading to customer dissatisfaction and an increase in the cost of order fulfillment due to rework. An order management system was, therefore, the need of the hour to eliminate manual processes and minimize delays in order execution.

Business problem  Delays in customer servicing due to the growing volume of business
IT solution An online e-commerce portal for customer order management
Implemented by Paresh Pujara, VP; Project Head, Ashish Chauhan, CIO and team
Technology platform  3-Tier architecture with ASP front end and MS-SQL and SAP database at the back-end
	Paresh Pujara, Vice President, Reliance Industries
	Ashish Chauhan, CIO, Reliance Industries

The B2B portal was created to allow customers to place orders online for any product from Reliance's various business divisions-be it petroleum, polymer, or polyster. This was tightly integrated with the backend ERP system running on SAP, so that orders would directly get updated after checking, and be moved online to various Reliance plants. Customers would also get updates on their order status through the ERP system itself. The portal has been integrated with Reliance's GPS tracking system implemented on its fleet of trucks.

This helps customers track their orders. Currently, the GPS system is in a pilot stage, and has been deployed across a few thousand trucks. It will be scaled up as soon as the initial teething troubles get resolved. The portal also provides proof of delivery for the Petrol retail business, order history and MIS. It even has a facility for rate negotiations for export orders.

The portal caters to more than 4000 agents, 800 Petrol retail outlets, and 70,000 medium and large customers. With such a large customer base, the portal gets an order every two seconds at its peak. No wonder then that the portal clocked more than Rs 26,000 crores worth of business in the last financial year. Reliance claims that this is more than what any other e-commerce portal in India has reached.

The technology
It's a standard front end based on ASP, JavaScript and VBScript with a MS SQL Server database at the back end, which stores all the online orders. This, in turn, is connected to the back end ERP database. There are two instances of each application and database server running and are configured for load balancing. Customers can connect to the portal from modems, ISDN, or even VSATs. 

The benefit of having a Web-based interface is that there's no management required at the customer end. The project started in 2002 and its implementation was completed last year. The Petrol retail integration was completed in the first quarter of this year. Reliance expects to integrate more lines of business to this portal, and even has plans to do supply side automation and materials management. Reliance is also a buyer as it is a seller, a huge thrust is planned for automating these processes as well. 

Internet sales B2B architecture

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