Engineering: Constructive Alliance

With its beginnings in the construction industry, later diversifying into retail, manufacturing, and services, the mammoth Essar Group, which is around $15 bn in revenues and has 70,000 employees spread across 20 countries, touches many verticals like energy, steel, infrastructure, services, and many more.

With reference to the Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) business, the vertical saw many developments from the IT perspective. Under the leadership of CN Ram, group CIO, the vertical designed its own power plant, and built right from conveyor belt to pilers, storage to plain track, etc.

Creating a Roadmap

For a multi-product company like Essar, the IT roadmap was about bringing standardization of processes with Standardize IT value management (VM) practices. The first touchpoint being the low-hanging fruit-like finance and accounting, vendor master and material master, etc. Another implementation in the loop was adopting desktop virtualization with a thin client across all the employees (up to 70,000) to benefit from easier maintenance, low power, security, and the ease of testing any new version of OS/applications and rolling all in the PC together.

The rationale was to make the vendors and partners business more visible, and use this information for analyzing the relationship, depth, and longevity of the partnerships, which could help in negotiating accordingly. Simultaneously, the above-stated step will improve the supply chain, raw material, and system based planning.

Also, since Essar uses SAP across all systems, they found it easier to modify intersections and easy to lay MIS at various levels from operational level to technology level. Its a long-term process, like a journey of ultimate standard process/protocol across, while its planning and implementation started around across the group in mid-2010.

Putting in Order

Ram wanted to create a strong link between business value creation and IT investments. In other words, spend money more wisely with value to fetch at least two times benefits from an implementation.

The major challenge in the process was to put a lot of things in order-attitude of people, bring technology to the forefront, and making IT a strategic tool. They established a team at the main IT level to deploy VM approach for the pilot projects.