NRL Embarks on a Digital Transformation for Its Capital Expansion Project Using AWS

 

To accelerate this project, NRL decided to implement the Integrated Electronic Data & Document Management System (IEDDMS), a solution that would streamline engineering review and approval workflows and manage its workforce effectively during the entire project life cycle. NRL turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by engaging Minfy Technologies (Minfy), an AWS Partner, so that it could host this solution in the cloud. Taking a cloud-first approach helped NRL save 25 percent on the total cost of ownership for its infrastructure, increase staff productivity, and achieve a high availability for the application. Moreover, NRL has become one of the first oil and gas companies in India to deploy such an engineering project collaboration solution in the cloud.

Based in the state of Assam, NRL is a subsidiary of Oil India Limited under the aegis of India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. NRL operates a refinery with a capacity of 3 million metric tons per year, producing motor spirit, high-speed diesel, and aviation fuel. It’s also one of India’s largest producers and marketers of paraffin wax. The company directly employs 989 people locally and another 4,500 people indirectly, and it is one of the most efficiently operated refineries in the country. Its distillate yield, a measure for production efficiency in oil refineries, is among the highest in India, and its energy consumption is among the lowest. Its gross refining margin is one of the best in the industry as well.

 

NRL’s expansion project is part of the Government of India’s Hydrocarbon Vision 2030 initiative that will help meet the growing demand of petroleum products across northeastern India. Because the NREP requires a significant investment of capital and collaboration across many stakeholders, NRL wanted to minimize delays related to project handovers and change of management. To address these challenges, NRL sought a secure, modular, cloud-based data management system that would optimize efficiency and improve profitability by reducing project costs, time, and risks. “In large oil and gas projects, collaboration among the key stakeholders is a major issue, which leads to implementation delays and cost overruns,” says Bhaskar Jyoti Phukan, Director Technical and Managing Director in charge, Numaligarh Refinery Limited. Building the IEDDMS was the beginning of NRL’s digital transformation journey.

In March 2021, NRL engaged Minfy for the implementation of the IEDDMS project through a competitive tendering process. This process resulted in an extensive and productive engagement between NRL and Minfy, and the solution went live in mid-2021. NRL and Minfy deployed the application using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which gives businesses full control over their virtual networking environments, including resource placement, connectivity, and security.

 

The company also adopted scalable solutions, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Using this solution, NRL has achieved high availability for the IEDDMS so that users can access it 24/7, meeting the requirements of its service-level agreements. NRL also uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), an easy-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service designed for Amazon EC2. By working in the cloud, NRL has avoided the fixed-priced, long-term commitment typical of an on-premises model, and the company pays for only the services consumed. Additionally, NRL can operate with greater agility and flexibility, scaling resources according to demand.

 

Within the first few weeks of going live, NRL was able to process more than 4,000 engineering documents. Previously, it would have taken a couple of months to review and approve the documents. “With the deployment of the IEDDMS, NRL was able to address project pain points regarding collaboration and make faster and better decisions to improve the project efficiency by saving thousands of human hours in the engineering review and approval,” says Phukan. For the entire project life cycle, NRL expects to process more than 100,000 documents, and it anticipates that the application will cut the time needed for document approval by 30–40 percent compared to the previous manual system. Now, users have clear visibility of data and documents, which can be tagged so that they are traceable. The solution also minimizes errors in the data input from the source, detects issues early, and supports smooth, secure data sharing.