CAREER TRACK
How long at current company:
30 months.
Most important career influencer:
It would be unfair to name a single person since I’ve been
very fortunate to have worked with brilliant team leaders, project
leaders and managers during my initial years at TCS. These years
gave me a strong foundation in team work, problem solving, project
management, effective communication, and above all, customer
service.
Decision I wish I could do over:
Investing in the stock market based on tips and sentiments
during the boom time of 1992 and the subsequent crash and financial
losses after the Harshad Mehta scandal.
VISION
The next big thing for my industry will be:
Supply chain optimization as this will give us benefits by
delivering on time at the right cost; reducing inventories at
various stage of production; reducing scrap and improving capacity
utilization, thereby improve the working capital and EBIDTA.
Advice for future CIOs:
- Spend significant time with the business and learn the basics
of business KPI’s.
- Develop the technology team to take care of daily IT work.
- Outsource routine work.
ON THE JOB
Top three initiatives:
- Supply chain optimization: Customers want frequent
changes and small lot sizes. The number of SKUs are rising
resulting in frequent changes in tooling and machining. All these
initiatives add to our costs and result in time overruns. Further,
sometimes major customers give us firmschedules with extremely
short lead times. To accommodate all this variability, the supply
chain has to be agile and efficient to meet changing demands.
Accordingly, supply chain optimization is one of the major focus
areas, and we are looking to improve and streamline our supply
chain processes.
- Rolling out a common ERP and business processes across the
world: Essel Propack has 21 factories in 13 countries. Many
factories are a result of acquisitions. This has resulted in
multiple IT systems (ERPs). The business processes supported by IT
applications in different companies are also different. To address
this issue, we are now in the process of rolling out a common ERP
(SAP) worldwide with a global business process template. This will
help us achieve standardization and acquire visibility into
business performance across locations.
- Consolidation of various IT systems and resources: To
improve our efficiencies, we are embarking on a process of data
center consolidation and server consolidation. This will be made
possible using virtualization technologies. This will help us
reduce IT costs and standardize IT service delivery.
How I measure IT effectiveness:
- By measuring business KPIs such as inventory, working capital,
operating costs etc
- By measuring IT KPIs such as the speed of rolling out IT
applications, cost of rolling out applications and uptime of the
application and network
- By conducting customer surveys and soliciting feedback on IT
services delivered. For example, we carry out an annual
‘voice of customer’ exercise to better understand
customer expectations, and set up improvement plans, where
required.
PERSONAL
Leisure activities: Reading, listening to
music, indoor games and practising Yoga
Best book read recently: ‘India’s
Global Powerhouses’ by Nirmalya Kumar
If I weren't a CIO, I'd be a... Musician.
As told to Srikanth RP
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