Recently, the Indian arm of Shell, the global petroleum and lubricants major, slightly tweaked its business model.

Rather than sell its industrial customers lubricants, it told them, “give us the charge of your manufacturing unit, or a part of it, and we will make sure it stays well lubricated.”

This lubricants-as-a-service is seeing a lot of traction, Praveen Nagpal, Shell Lubricants India’s Chief Technological Officer, told BusinessLine . Shell began this ‘lube management programme’ last year, he said.

While not wanting to name customers, Nagpal said that the demand for such a service has been streaming in mainly from steel manufacturers and mining companies. For steel companies, Shell charges an amount for every tonne of steel produced. As for mining companies, Nagpal observed that often a lot of heavy vehicles in mines are left unattended. Shell puts sensors in those vehicles, lubricates them, tracks them, and charges the miners for the vehicle uptime.

The ‘lube management programme’ is one of the many of its B2B offerings; the others include services such as monitoring oil condition and providing predictive maintenance of equipment, lube advisory services by Shell’s experts.

Nagpal wants to pitch Shell as a “trusted partner” in India’s “transition to Industry 4.0”. Nagpal said Shell is not affected much, so far, by the slowdown in the automotive industry, as the large fleet of old vehicles still needs lubricants.

Automotive sector

Also, he said the company is prepared for the advent of electric vehicles, which would also need lubricants, even if in lesser quantities. Shell’s lubricants that are sold in India are produced in Qatar from natural gas (gas-to-liquids), rather than from lube base oils from refineries.

Nagpal said the GTL lubricants are “the purest and cleanest” automotive lubricants because as contain almost zero sulphur — even better than BS-VI norms.

comment COMMENT NOW