NNPC Moves Petrol Sales Online to Reduce Physical Contact

By Emmanuel Addeh

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said Wednesday that it has deployed a sales and distribution application in the oil and gas secondary model portal that will enable marketers to buy petroleum products online.

The corporation noted that the move is to minimise human contacts in business transactions at the Petroleum Products Marketing Company (PPMC), a downstream subsidiary of NNPC, as a result of the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A statement in Abuja by the NNPC Group General Manager, Group Public Affairs Division, Dr. Kennie Obateru, quoted the corporation’s Group General Manager, Information Technology Division (ITD), Danladi Inuwa, as saying that some major marketers had already begun the use of the new platform.

He said the application, known as the Customer Express, would also enable marketers to register, validate and revalidate their bulk purchase agreements online within a week.

According to the national oil company, the portal also provides a dashboard that enables the corporation to track every molecule of products being imported, transported and sold at every given time.

“The portal shows what product is in transit in terms of volume, what quantity is in the jetty, what volume has gone into the pipelines, what quantity has gone into NNPC depots, private depots and refinery depots. So, we have accurate accounting of every molecule of products that we have in our system.

“Already, the members of Major Marketers Association of Nigeria (MOMAN) are now purchasing products online seamlessly while the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN), Depot and Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPMAN) and other relevant downstream stakeholders are expected to start transacting business on the platform soon,” the NNPC disclosed.

The organisation stated that an application that can show the volume of stocks in the tanks of all NNPC retail stations across the country had equally been deployed and the ticketing digitised, affirming that more technological innovations would be deployed in the months ahead.

Similarly, it stated that despite the recent lockdown in the country, the NNPC business value chains were not affected as the corporation had over 4,000 virtual meetings, 9.3 million minutes of audio time, 6.7 million minutes of video time and 2.1 million minutes of screen shared times.

According to the NNPC, for the purposes of operational efficiency and accountability within the corporation’s system, the national oil company has also developed a contacts-tracing software application that would be deployed in all its locations across the country.

“The contacts-tracing solution is ready to be deployed, all the technical testings have been done and the solution is ready to go live.

“Everywhere you go around NNPC locations would be covered by this novel application which would reveal all information about persons visiting any official and should there be any medical challenge, the NNPC medical team would be able to track from the information at the data base all the contacts and advise properly,” the national oil company affirmed.

It added that the application could also be used by members of staff of the corporation to document their private visitors at their homes, stressing that the novel application would enable the workforce to adjust adequately to the ‘new normal’ way of living to minimise the spread of the disease.