Auto dip posting of LPG stock into SAP

The brief

Every LPG plant must post its opening and closing stock into SAP. Done by hand, the figures are late, error-prone and open to manipulation. IOCL, and later BPCL, wanted measured tank levels posted automatically.

What we built

SCADA collects live levels; every morning at 6 am a Java routine posts them to SAP through a remote function call. Running at about 16 IOCL plants since 2017 and 6 BPCL plants.

• How a posting runs

  SCADA reads the tank level transmitters continuously and applies each tank's calibration table to convert level to quantity. At 6 a.m. the values are frozen with a time stamp, and a Java routine posts them to SAP through a remote function call against the plant's material codes.

• When something fails

  SAP's response is logged. Failures are retried and raised on the SCADA screen, so the plant knows when a posting is pending. A daily exception report lists any manual override, showing head office when a measured value was changed and by whom.

• The control network stays isolated

  The posting runs from a SCADA-side node through a defined interface. Nothing on the enterprise side can write to the PLC.

Outcomes