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 Case studies Energy and Utilities
| Improved plant wide data integration at a leading Asian oil major |
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| The client |
| The client is the biggest oil and gas company in Malaysia and among the Asian giants in the oil and gas space. |
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| The challenge |
| Like any other major refining plant, the client's refinery was using a wide array of applications for its day-to-day operations. The primary application called OAS (Oil Accounting and Shipping System) is used to track the Oil (crude as well as finished products) movements within refinery and also to control the financial activities related to Oil receipt/ dispatch. This application performs the role of a data-warehouse for the refinery. The application needs data from various sources such as Distributed Control System, Oil Movement and Storage system, laboratory systems, Terminal Automation System, Refinery planning system and reconciled data from the mass balance application system.
For the above data sources, there were interface programs running on a central OAS server, which brought in the data into the OAS database. However this architecture had the following limitations:
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High degree of vendor support required for modifications and maintenance as the system is based on a point-to-point custom-developed architecture. This was working out to be very expensive. |
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Lack of scalability. The customer was in the process of implementing an enterprise wide Supply Chain Management (SCM) solution and realized that its existing refinery architecture would make it very cumbersome for data exchange between SCM and OAS to take place. The present refinery architecture also constrained live data exchange between the customer’s central SAP server and the OAS system. |
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High vulnerability to network and database related problems, the occurrence of which would cause the interface programs to fail without any warning to the business user. |
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| The solution |
| Wipro’s plant wide data integration technology offering was ideally suited for such an environment and helped the customer solve all their current business issues and provide them an ideal platform for their future expansion plans regarding data and application integration. Wipro’s solution is an Enterprise Application Integration based architecture, which works on the principle of Messaging Bus. IBM’s Websphere integration suite was chosen as the middleware, which provides all the applications (including OAS) a messaging interface through custom developed Java based “adapters”. All the refinery applications use this interface to connect to the middleware server through messages, which in turn logs and routes the messages to target applications. Thus the existing point-to-point architecture is replaced with a hub-and-spoke architecture. |
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| The benefits |
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Improved scalability was achieved as the solution is based on industry standard middleware. This has ensured that future expansion is smooth and enterprise wide applications like SCM and SAP have easy access to live plant data through the middleware. |
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Greater integration and data exchange between applications was enabled by opening up of legacy applications. This was made possible as all the adapters were designed to convert the data format into industry standard XML format before being put onto the messaging bus. |
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Reduced vulnerability to database and network outages by using middleware that assured once-and-only-once delivery of all messages. |
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Improved user friendliness that was brought about by providing e-mail notifications to system administrators in case problems cropped up. |
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