Packaging has become an advanced tool to attract buyers in most markets. It won’t be out of league to say that for a manufacturing organization, packaging has become a strategic tool. In India, too, this trend has been visible since the late eighties – and much of the credit for what many term as “a packaging revolution” can be given arguably to one single company, Uflex Industries. This flexible packaging giant, headquartered in Noida near New Delhi, was set up in 1983 with a vision to offer Indian consumers a new flashy experience while they shop – in the process ensuring the business success of manufactures.

With 7,500 employees spread across the globe and manufacturing facilities located at Noida, Gwalior, Baddi, Jammu, Mexico and Dubai, Uflex provides complete integrated packaging solutions, right from design to delivery, to a whole gamut of industry players.

The company has achieved full backward integration, by producing all critical inputs which are used for any packaging solution. This includes BOPET (Bi-axially Oriented Poly Ethylene Terephthalate) and BOPP (Bi-axially Oriented Polypropylene) films, inks, adhesives and substrates, holographic films, blown film and other raw materials. Most of these involve critical process manufacturing steps that must be tightly controlled and monitored for adherence to specs and quality.

Business apps at the core
In this context, Uflex’s reliance on information technology is extremely important to its overall business success – something that the top management understands and gives top priority to.
As a core integrating business solution, Uflex has opted for Oracle eBusiness Suite, which touches the entire manufacturing and business processes of the company. Elaborating on Uflex’s IT infrastructure, Praveen Chaudhary, IT Consultant, says, “IT is identified as the key enabler for our business. We have technology integration at many levels of our business operations. For example, we have Oracle process manufacturing solution which is a complete automated solution – from taking sales orders from the customer to dispatching the finished product to them. This solution covers many processes like costing, scheduling, manufacturing and dispatch.”

By automating the sales order feeding process, the company believes that it has not only saved the time of their customers but also optimized the productivity of its sales employees. “Earlier, we were following a manual setup for sales order feeding, which had some limitations. After the new solution in place, we not only avail of the benefits of an automated sales process, our sales professionals can do the entire process sitting at any location,” says Chaudhary.

After taking the orders, the next important step in the manufacturing chain for Uflex, like for most process manufacturing companies, is production planning. Which is where collaboration kicks in. “From this juncture, the material management team comes into play. We have an automated and collaborative module of Oracle process management solution that enables various departments to collaborate on any specific project as to how to move further. Such collaboration leads to accurate scheduling of the project,” says Chaudhary.
Giving an insight into the peculiarities of the packaging business, Chaudhary says, “In our business, ink is the main component in the entire manufacturing inventory. Since this is the most expensive component for us, we were very sensitive about its consumption.” So, monitoring and controlling the usage of ink becomes a focus area for the IT department. To take better control of the situation, says Chaudhary, his team connected the ink dispensing machine with the Oracle eBusiness server. “By doing this, we now have full control of total ink inventory, as we are able to manage and monitor ink usage by an automated process,” says Chaudhary.

Besides ink usage, power consumption and cooling are other functions automated through the eBusiness server. Says Chaudhary, “Our power management solution has enabled us to not only control the power expenses but it also intelligently manages our power and cooling infrastructure in an automated manner through Oracle eBusiness servers.” Uflex recently consolidated its servers spread all over India into a centrally located data center at its corporate office in Noida. For business continuity planning, the data center uses a synchronous data replication solution which replicates data every minute on a mirror site located out of India. (As per company policy, Uflex does not share the location of the DR site.)

Cost savings
Technology infusion has resulted in significant business benefits for Uflex. Commenting on the overall value that IT has brought for the company, Chaudhary says that apart from streamlining the business processes, Uflex has managed to cut “30% to 40% of total production cost with the help of various IT tools.”
From the management’s perspective, the extensive IT infrastructure at Uflex is no more a ‘nice to have’ thing but an acknowledged necessity – even if without all its benefits being quantifiable. “Although ERP applications are tightly integrated with the core business, there is no clear differentiation of how much cost savings they [individually] deliver for the company. But we do have initiatives like an intranet and IP phones, which bring huge cost savings for the company.” Chaudhary added, “We are saving more than 70% of our earlier total communications expenditure by using an IP-based intranet.”

Beyond communications, Chaudhary also highlights another area in which the IT department has saved money – remote infrastructure management (RIM) for desktop management. “Our IT department is using RIM very effectively. Earlier, our service engineers needed to be physically present at the concerned desktop, but now most of the maintenance activity happens remotely.” This has resulted in significant cost savings and maintenance, upgrade and management of systems for the company.

Challenges and the way ahead

There are still some business challenges where the IT department of Uflex has to come up with solutions. The biggest challenge for the company at the moment is to manage power more effectively. “Power is an area on which manufacturing is highly dependent. I see this as an opportunity for the IT department to show its utility. Although we are working very closely on this front, there is a huge scope of managing power more effectively,” says Chaudhary.

Another challenge Uflex faces is the constant need to get trained manpower on Oracle eBusiness applications. Says Chaudhary, “Although we have majority of our applications built on Oracle, managing the infrastructure is a struggle because of lack of trained manpower on Oracle. I should say that Oracle solutions are good but the vendor has to do something productive on the manpower front.”
For its own 20-odd infrastructure management team, Uflex tackles the manpower issue by keeping an additional 10 people in training. According to Chaudhary, this way the company eases the issue of getting skilled manpower, because it can deploy these personnel “as and when we get some extra requirement.” For better productivity and effective training, the company uses video conferencing extensively for training its employees.