India state refiner HPCL uses blockchain to verify purchase orders

India’s state-run refiner Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), one of India’s largest oil and gas companies, is launching a blockchain system to enable automated verification of purchase orders (POs).

HPCL has partnered with the blockchain software firm Zupple Labs to integrate its blockchain-based digital credentialing technology into the purchase order system, the firms said in a joint announcement.

Called LegitDoc, Zupple Labs’ verification tech enables HPCL to issue digital POs to its vendors without having to manually verify the PO requests. From a third-party verifier’s perspective, the project provides a facility to directly verify the validity of POs in an automated way on the HPCL website.

“The implementation helps to automate the verification of HPCL POs to external parties,” a spokesperson for HPCL told Cointelegraph. “This works by integrating the blockchain system with HPCL’s internal e-PO and generates tamper-evident verifiable POs,” the representative noted, adding:

“These POs will be dispatched to vendors which in turn can be shared with third parties. Any third-party verifier can directly verify these POs on the HPCL vendor portal verification application.”

According to the HPCL spokesperson, the company has been collaborating with Zupple Labs on the blockchain project over the past six months. “HPCL has completed building the blockchain PO system successfully and the same facility will be made official to the vendors within this month,” the representative stated.

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The spokesperson said that HPCL has implemented the blockchain-based PO system on both private blockchain and public blockchain.

According to Zupple Labs co-founder and business lead Neil Martis, the PO verification system has involved the implementation of “two parallel blockchains” used as settlement layers, including the public Near blockchain and the private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. Martis noted that the latter was used as part of HPCL’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy. According to Zupple Labs, HPCL issued 3,000 POs via the facility as of mid-October 2023.

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