Draping IT Well

With over 60% market share in India, Raymond is currently the largest

integrated manufacturer of worsted fabric in the world. Apart from the fabric

ace, Raymond has a strong IT infrastructure that has enabled it to stay ahead in

the race.

Raymond hosts business applications like SAP, MS Attain, Stage & Legacy

applications for various businesses. In SAP, Raymond has three instances namely,

IS-MILL, IS-AFS & IS-Retail catering to the end-end operations from yarn

manufacturing to the secondary sales operations to the company/franchisees owned

over 300 outlets.

The company boasts of SAP ECC 6.0 for IS-MILL, IS-AFS & IS-Retail

applications for its textile and retail business and in the SOA structure,

Netweaver 2004S, XI (for interfaces), EP (enterprise portal) are used. Business

Ware House (BW) on BEX reporting is used for numerical analytics, and visual

composer is used for graphical dashboards. SAP SOLMAN solution manager tool set,

is used for call monitoring and SLA monitoring is used for SAP related calls for

internal customers.

The network security equipment have been availed from Cisco, Secure Computing

and Juniper. Microsoft SCOM has been installed for iAsset management as well as

for remote management for monitoring. Connectivity across all locations is

provided mainly by three service providers namely Bharti, Tulip, and Sify. Apart

from this, even some BSNL point-to-point links and Tata Indicoms Internet links

are also present.

Our IT infrastructure helped us shift from dedicated resources to shared resource pools	Arindam Sinha, GM, IT, corporate, Raymond

For back-up management, Veritas and HP data protector is used. The companys

data center operations mainly include SAP production servers that are currently

remotely hosted at the Sify Data Center in Vashi. The company has its own center

of excellence & data center (for development and quality) at its ERP office in

Thane.

Benefits Galore



According to Arindam Sinha, GM, IT, corporate, Raymond, this infrastructure

did spell benefits, like there was a shift from dedicated resources to shared

resource pools, business linked SLAs, effective IT management and service

delivery. He further adds that costs per user support and infrastructure costs

were also reduced and there was a lower TCO for owing a single platform and

higher uptime in business.

Challenges No Less



Infrastructure optimization and standardization had to be in alignment with

business strategy and in the long run also ensure end user productivity and

satisfaction. Sinha further cautions that apart from this, business continuity

and disaster recovery, managing security and threats and at the same time

reducing the cost of IT operations added to the problems.

Apart from retaining skilled resources in the changing market scenario,

constant delivery standards had to be maintained due to demanding business

requirements. Stringent SLAs had to be induced into IT capability without

increasing costs. Implementation of SOPs at various levels and constant

pressure on infrastructure security team made the environment a no intrusion

zone.

These issues were resolved by physical consolidation of IT operations,

strengthening the network, using centralized service desk and monitoring of

service delivery.

Sinha says the company faced issues like cost reduction for IT operations,

business continuity and disaster recovery. The implementation of server

virtualization enabled better consolidation and capacity utilization, and also

reduced the burden on resources. Use of interim DR site enabled to manage IT

risks better and web conferencing (WebEx, OCS) enabled better end user

productivity and reduced costs.

Shilpa Shanbagh



shilpas@cybermedia.co.in