Shell’s ‘lube-as-a-service’ offer gains traction

August 6, 2019 5:21 pm

The Indian arm of Shell, the global petroleum and lubricants major, has slightly tweaked its business model. Rather than sell its industrial customers lubricants, it asked for an authority of either a part, or complete charge of their manufacturing unit, and they would ensure of the lubrication.

This lubricants-as-a-service is seeing a lot of traction ever since Shell began this ‘lube management programme’ last year. 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, Praveen Nagpal, Shell Lubricant’s CTO, 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 pitches Shell as a “trusted partner” in India’s “transition to Industry 4.0”, saying, Shell is not affected much, so far, by the slowdown in the automotive industry, as the large fleet of old vehicles still needs lubricants.

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