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'Biggest IT challenge for construction equipment manufacturing is the supply chain'

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Charu Murgai
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As a CIO of a construction equipment manufacturing company, how do you perceive IT? Is it working as a support function or a business enabler?

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In the construction equipment manufacturing industry, there are key players which are big MNCs, as well as emerging players which are being supported by giants. There is a huge competition among several players, and the competition is intensifying every day. As we are relatively a new player in this industry, so far we have experienced that all the companies use IT to differentiate in specific areas, although the market we operate is primarily for cost leaders. Hence, IT has to work as a business enabler, and IT should have a planned transition, such that the organization moves from IT-enabled to IT-driven. Our parent organization Ashok Leyland has also been helping us a lot, so that our business is already IT-enabled in various areas.

What are the most common IT challenges in the construction equipment manufacturing sector?

The most common IT challenge is to address the entire supply chain effectively, especially taking care of our dealers and end customers. We are currently trying to address the same through our SAP system.

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What trends do you see as far as IT implementation and usage goes in the construction equipment manufacturing sector?

The trend is towards analytics to provide meaningful and effective insights for the decision-making management team. Other areas of ISMAC (Internet of things, Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) are also influencing the IT implementation and usage, based on the size of the organizations and their long-term IT strategies.

How are you leveraging social media, mobile, and cloud computing? We are currently trying to leverage analytics out of ISMAC, as we feel that we will be able to improve our decision-making based on useful insights. We are planning to utilize the effectiveness of mobile technology 12 to 18 months down the line. We are still analyzing the security aspects of cloud computing.

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In order to avoid a trade-off between security and accessibility, how can CIOs best ensure a mix of both? This is a very big challenge in any industry. As I am playing multiple roles of CIO, CTO, and CISO for my organization, my life becomes relatively easier as only one person is the decision-maker. However, we are facing the trade-off requirement whenever the security requirement slows down the system speed, for instance. The required security standards have to be in place, and hence security takes our top priority. As required by our parent organizations, Ashok Leyland and John Deere, we are following the standards ISO 27001, SOx, and COBIT.

How important is big data and analytics for Ashok Leyland John Deere?

As we do not have huge petabytes of data, we are not planning big data initiatives in the immediate future. Big data will definitely be useful to our parent organizations, considering their data size and number of years of existence. However, we are planning to implement analytics to get useful insights for effective decision-making.

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