The challenge
Legacy, manual fuelling at rail depots left accuracy, reconciliation and safety to paperwork and human judgment - a costly and hazardous way to move millions of litres of diesel into locomotives every year.
Accuracy
Manual dispensing and hand-written logs made per-locomotive volume hard to verify and easy to dispute.
Safety
Fuelling live locomotives at a depot is a hazardous operation demanding controlled, monitored, interlocked flow.
Reconciliation
Volumes had to tie out across depots, shifts and BPCL's own reporting with a clean audit trail.
What we built
A hardware-integrated fuelling platform that automates, monitors and reports every litre - each capability answering a specific operational stake above.
- ◆Fuelling automationControlled, metered dispensing per locomotive with interlocks and preset volumes - no manual guesswork.
- ◆Hardware / PLC integrationSoftware tied directly to pumps, flow meters and PLCs over Modbus, so the platform commands and reads the physical plant.
- ◆Real-time monitoringLive depot dashboards showing flow, status and alarms as fuelling happens - visibility across all six sites.
- ◆Reporting & reconciliationAutomatic per-transaction, per-shift and per-depot records with an audit trail that ties out to BPCL reporting.
The stack
Industrial-grade software on a hardware foundation - delivered jointly with Spectrum Technology.
Delivery model: Spectrum handles the hardware and field integration; Silex builds the software, SCADA/HMI and dashboards. The same blue-chip partnership behind BPCL, Indian Railways and both airport projects - which is how a senior ~15-person software team delivers hardware-integrated systems at national scale.
Results
In continuous production since 2021 and scaled across the network, the platform turned a manual, dispute-prone process into accurate, safe, reconciled fuelling with a full audit trail - the numbers a prospect can forward internally without a caveat.
"The platform gave us accurate, tamper-resistant fuelling and a clean audit trail across every depot - reliable enough to run without a second thought."
- Operations lead, BPCL depot network (illustrative - attribution pending client approval)
Why it matters
Fuel depots, airports and railways don't get to have an outage. When a system runs 200M+ litres across six sites for years without a major failure, ownership and longevity stop being marketing claims and become the operating record. That is the same discipline Silex brings to a B2B ordering platform or a retail stack - engineered to your business, owned by you, and supported for the long run.
