The Chennai Petroleum Corporation (CPCL) has embarked on a major human resources initiative through a string of tie-ups to ready its employees for the difficult market conditions that are likely to prevail in the post-deregulation period.
As part of this approach, the company has tied up with premier educational institutes, including the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), and the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (BITS). According to the company's latest annual report, IIMB has, with effect from June, begun to train its top, senior and mid-level executives through a custom-made executive development programme.
On the other hand, CPCL has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with BITS, Pilani, for offering a three-year off-campus course in process engineering to undergraduates at the company's Manali refinery. At the end of the course, where classes will be conducted on holidays, enrolled employees will be given a degree by BITS, which will qualify them as engineers.
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CPCL, which became a 51 per cent subsidiary of oil marketing major Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) earlier this year when the government sold its stake to IOC, is striving to further secure its position in "a relatively unpredictable open market situation", following the dismantling of administered pricing mechanism (APM), from April 2002. CPCL, a refining company, currently does not have a marketing network of its own to sell the four controlled products.
The new HR initiatives have been taken up in order to "instill a sense of objectivity" in the changed scenario. The company has initiated a massive programme to educate its employees at all levels about the challenges of the market-driven pricing mechanism through newletters, seminars and video shows.
Among other things, CPCL has teamed up with Engineers India (EIL) to conduct a blending optimisation study for an off-site automation project. This is aimed at increasing the refining company's revenue through a reduction of blending time and the delay in despatch of products.