State-owned Indian Oil Corporation on Tuesday said its Indane LPG booking and delivery system managed by IBM India has experienced an outage for last two days.
“Currently the system is under recovery... hopeful to resolve the issue by today evening so that we can service your calls as usual from tomorrow,” the oil major told customers. It did not mention what triggered the outage.
Sources among officials and cooking gas distributors in different States said, in layman’s terms one of the servers, crucial for the Indane customer database, crashed on Saturday when a software patching work was being undertaken. Consequently Indane customers faced challenges while booking refills, particularly they did not receive text message confirming the order has been placed.
Alternative methods
Stating that it is working with IBM and Oracle to restore the system at the earliest, IOC said customers can continue to make booking through SMS or IVRS number 77189 55555; missed call facility 84549 55555; WhatsApp 75888 88824; and through their distributors directly or reach out to the showroom phone lines displayed on cash memo as well.
“Your bookings will be registered and we shall continue to deliver cylinders to you as soon as we can,” it said, expressing regret for the inconvenience.
The fallout was evident in Kerala with customers in many areas rushing to book the refills, at Indane cooking gas distributorships. The demand for liquefied petroleum gas is more than usual in the State in the backdrop of the ensuing Onam festival, an official said.
There are 14 crore Indane customers across the country and they are being catered to by 12,800 distributors. In urban areas, the backlog or the time taken from the booking for the refill to be supplied is 1.5 to 2 days, while in rural areas it is higher.
The refill bookings are more in the first 10 days every month as households place order after the salaries are received. With the festival season setting in, monsoon in several parts of the country and winter approaching, the LPG consumption is also higher, a distributor, who did wish to be named, said, while pointing to how it is important for the issue to be addressed immediately.
Following the outage, IOC is mailing details of the bookings by customers to the respective distributors. For customers approaching the showroom, their request is noted manually, another distributor said, adding that if the issue persists it may lead to increase in the backlog. While it will be sometime for a clear picture on the impact, including data loss if any, to emerge, an immediate task for the showrooms was managing the rush of customers with the skeleton front office staff they are left with in the backdrop of large-scale technology adoption.
