Automating The Enterprise

The company with operations in 4 different continents namely UK, USA, India
and South America produces more than 180 models of construction equipments. The
India unit became a wholly owned subsidiary in 2003 and now has a manufacturing
plant at Ballabhgarh in Haryana and is in the process of setting up another one
in Pune.

After it became an Indian subsidiary, some operational changes were
introduced and as the business grew, it became imperative for the management to
keep a track of the inventory, payment outgoings, order purchases etc for making
more informed decisions.

Automation thus became the order of the day in order to keep track of all
important business activities and integrate critical processes.

Initial Hiccups

For any SMB units, finance is a major concern and JCB too was no different.
“The cost to store data increased with respect to time and some times the old
storage needs to be upgraded to a level higher than the previous in order to
attain prompt services. Adding to the troubles was the fact that a robust backup
policy for data and power needs to be equally strong, which again required more
funds,” JCB India Deputy General Manager IT, Pratap Pat Joshi said. Even its
regional offices were ill equipped to pass the bill at their level, which meant
that the purchase requisitions were stuck for final approval.

The company also lacked the availability of adequate technical staff and
sufficient space for the storage device to be installed and the necessary
environmental conditions.

But even as JCB faced problems on the financial front, it had the support of
its top management. “In the fast-changing scenario in the recent years, IT
enablement of our growing business was gradually becoming imperative. And our
top management was keen on aligning IT with business strategy,” Joshi said.

Single Vendor Benefits

The choices were clear, the company wanted to have a total solutions
provider which was capable of providing both hardware and software elements of
the IT infrastructure and therefore consulted major IT vendors. “After a
rigorous evaluation exercise, we decided to partner with HP as it met the
required criteria of proven capabilities, vast product and services range and
globally benchmarked methodologies. Feedback from other companies was definitely
a major input in taking the decision as well,” Joshi said.

As part of its enterprise-wide integration initiative, JCB was planning to
roll out a SAP program by the first quarter of 2005. The requisite IT platform
therefore had to provide the necessary performance boost to get the best out of
SAP applications and enable all users to get access to vital information in near
real-time.

JCB went live with SAP on 4th April 2005. As expected, such a large-scale IT
transformation had to take into consideration whether adequate training was
provided to their employees to ease the transformation from a manual to an
automated system.

Once the required storage deployment was done, the benefits of timely
automation were felt in the company. “The early benefits included fast data
retrieval, archival and restoration; presence of sound fault tolerance
management meant a secured environment and an economical space usage resulted in
optimal usage of available storage device,” he said.

Stuti Das