CASE STUDY :
EFKON IN THE NATIONWIDE FUEL PAYMENT & LOYALTY PROJECT OF HINDUSTAN PETROLEUM CORP.

1         Executive Summary

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (HPCL) is the second largest oil marketing company in India and is a Government of India Undertaking. HPCL runs more than 4500 retail outlets across India. Three years ago HPCL embarked on a program to roll out smart card based retail and fleet loyalty products using e-payments. ICICI Bank, India’s second largest bank was chosen to do cash management, sales and banking operations for the project. HPCL & ICICI Bank chose Efkon as the technology provider for the project. The project includes three different programs, one targeted at retail customers (HP Smart1) and one targeted at fleet owners (Drive Track) and Drive Smart.

 2         History of the Project

The project in its first 2.5 years of operation became extremely popular and successful. As a result of extremely stable backend system which could be easily upgraded for increased volumes I-Pay was able to scale-up operations in-line with the fast growth in customer and transaction numbers. Within the first 2.5 years the customer base has crossed 1.600.000 users and total transactions per year > 500 mio USD. Today the project covers every major city and highway in the country and has spread across 2500 retail outlets of HPCL.

3         Efkon Scope of Work

I-Pay has played the role of an application Service Provider for the project. The entire software has been designed and deployed by Efkon. The major scope of the project is:

• Design & development of the clearing house, terminal and network software.
• Set-up of a nation-wide network on a Virtual Private Network (VPN) backbone.
• Set-up of the clearing house host and deployment of the same.
• Deployment of terminals and smart card readers.
• Set-up of Operations centre to handle:
  1. Smart card personalisation.
  2. Despatch management.
  3. Network management.
  4. Card data management and transaction management.
  5. Help desk.
  6. Customer call centre.

4         Execution of the project

Challenges

The major challenge for Efkon was to develop in a short time a customized and future upgradeable clearing house software inclusive the Fronted and WAN/LAN all over India! Further, it was the first challenging experience for Efkon to provide ASP services. A large organisation had to be built in Austria & India to enable successful operations.

Efkon took major business risks by investing in the software development without assured returns. Much of the returns were dependent on the success of the program and the stability of the clearing house host. In both cases Efkon came out with flying colours.

During the project, Efkon India doubled to almost five times its original size, introduced a quality management system according to ISO9000, and implemented the various other toll plaza related projects, while still focused on capturing the greater Indian transportation market.

5         Current Status and Future Outlook

The project is in full operation and progressing well. All I-Pay systems work without problems. The project however is continuously evolving to match requirements from the end customers.

HPCL / ICICI Bank expects the turnover on the system to reach > US$50 million per month by end of 2006. Further the program will be expanded in scope to include multi-applications. The number of participating retail outlets in the program are expected to exceed 3500 by end 2006.

For more Detail: Contact Pushkar Kulkarni at p.kulkarni@efkon.com

Contact at Customer:

HPCL: Mr. PT Suresh at ptsuresh@hpcl.co.in

Max Staudinger, Mar. 2005

m.staudinger@efkon.com