Having spent more than 25 years at Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative (IFFCO), Seema Gaur has worked herself up from the lower rungs to the position of Deputy GM (Systems). In fact, she spent the past four years heading the IT Department of a manufacturing plant within the group.
Seema has an impressive list of responsibilities that include: IT infrastructure management; needassessment for computerization of business activities in the plant; hardware & software procurement; establishing the computer network; in-house development of software; implementation of applications; conformance to IT standards; end-user training.
Serious, dedicated, sincere, knowledgeable and above all, fully involved. That’s how mentor SC Mittal describes Seema. “She takes a lot of initiative and is always willing to try something new. Seema has transparent interactions with the team and also the business users,” says S C Mittal, Senior ED (MS&IT) and Group CTO, IFFCO. “She has a habit of recording and documenting discussions and producing these at the appropriate time.”
Technology itself is the biggest challenge for Seema, and she keeps up with developments through reading and by exploring new initiatives. She has a unique way of convincing end-users, using case studies and presentations to drive her points across.
PROJECTS
IFFCO is a world leading fertilizer manufacturing and marketing cooperative. It has five manufacturing plants in India. IFFCO sells more than 11 million MT of fertilizer annually, through its cooperative societies spread all over India.
Fertilizer manufacturing is a continuous operating chemical process. Maintenance and up-keep of plant equipment is an important aspect of plant operation. This system
is aimed at automating the record keeping and analysis of various plant maintenance activities.
While Seema has undertaken numerous projects at IFFCO, the most notable ones are the Plant Maintenance Management System and the Common Dispatch System.
The Plant Maintenance Management System involved the development of a highly comprehensive software that was developed and deployed at the Aonla Unit — and later implemented at all five manufacturing units of IFFCO. It covers all aspects of recording, monitoring and analysis of maintenance activities of the plant. The system has contributed in shutdown planning, regular maintenance jobs and the creation of knowledge bank of issues and remedies, thereby reducing the plant downtime.
Seema also led the project for Common Dispatch System. This helped in streamlining the dispatches of fertilizer by different modes, in reducing demurrage, in ensuring compliance of data entry into the Government of India’s Portal about daily fertilizer dispatches.
Under Seema’s leadership, there were other successful implementations at IFFCO, such as the e-procurement system, the Spare Parts Codification system, LAN upgradation, the Technical Reporting system, Biometric Attendance Recording system, and infrastructure upgradation.
In her long career in Systems, Seema has been instrumental in implementing major business applications like material management, payroll, financial accounting, budgeting, human resources management, product dispatch and distribution, complaints monitoring, and process stream quality analysis.