One of India’s largest oil and gas companies, Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), is launching a blockchain system to facilitate automated verification of purchase orders (POs).
The companies announced in a joint statement that the blockchain software company Zupple Labs and HPCL have partnered to incorporate HPCL’s blockchain-based digital credentialing technology into the purchase order system.
LegitDoc is the name of Zupple Labs’ verification technology that enables HPCL to issue digital POs to its vendors without manually verifying the PO requests.
From the perspective of a third-party verifier, the initiative provides the capability to directly and automatically verify the validity of POs on the HPCL website.
“The implementation helps to automate the verification of HPCL POs with external parties,” an HPCL representative said. “This works by integrating the blockchain system with HPCL’s internal e-PO and generates tamper-evident, verifiable POs,” a representative explained, adding:
These purchase orders will be sent to vendors, who may share them with third parties. On the HPCL vendor portal verification application, any third-party verifier can directly confirm these POs.
According to a spokesperson for HPCL, the company has collaborated with Zupple Labs for the past six months on the blockchain initiative. “HPCL has completed construction of the blockchain PO system, and the same facility will be made available to vendors within this month,” a representative said.
The representative stated that HPCL has implemented the blockchain-based PO system on private and public blockchains.
According to Neil Martis, co-founder and business director of Zupple Labs, the PO verification system has implemented “two parallel blockchains” as settlement layers, including the public Near blockchain and the private Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. Martis noted that the latter was part of HPCL’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy.
As of mid-October 2023, according to Zupple Labs, HPCL issued 3,000 purchase orders through the facility.
