BPCL Goes Live On Oracle DBA Service For Customer Loyalty Programme

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) has now gone live on Oracle's Online Database Application (DBA) service for its customer loyalty programme, PetroCard. The PetroCard smart card application runs on Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Real Application Clusters. The online service constantly monitors BPCL’s database and application infrastructure to ensure smooth running of the loyalty programme.

The PetroCard customer loyalty programme represents 25 percent of BPCL’s total sales spread across the country. BPCL selected Oracle on the basis of its technology and service that could handle high transaction loads without any disruption in customer satisfaction. Oracle’s online DBA service provides round-the-clock maintenance and infrastructure support.

Oracle online DBA service provides optimised system performance, and availability for BPCL, by proactively monitoring the Oracle environment and reducing the cost of the DBA. The service identifies and responds to issues that may impact the availability and performance by reducing maintenance downtime.

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The team at Oracle reviewed BPCL’s architecture and devised a plan to roll out the online service where data from 7,000 terminals was uploaded and alert parameters were set. At the same time, simple settings were changed on the BPCL firewall to allow Oracle staff to access the company’s servers remotely while maintaining a high level of security.

With the implementation of Oracle online DBA service, BPCL is saving around Rs 2 million (close to $42,000) annually in costs associated with database monitoring. The online service has helped BPCL reduce its staffing costs and eliminate the burden of implementing shifts and special compensation plans.

"For PetroCard, we wanted a service, which can handle the high transaction load without any disruption in customer service. Therefore, it was crucial for us to have a solid maintenance and support infrastructure in place, which we found in Oracle’s Online DBA solution," said Ajay Nigam, senior manager, BPCL (DB). "By using Oracle’s Online DBA solution, we are assured that our loyalty program is always available. We would normally have to hire and train staff to perform this, but now this extra cost has been eliminated."