IT for more Firepower

RR Murthy

IT in BEL

BEL is a Government of India enterprise catering to the defense electronics
market. It is close to a billion-dollar company, having 13,000 people at the
corporate level. It has eight manufacturing plants in India and two offices in
New York and Singapore. BEL is increasingly focusing on R&D to meet the
global challenges. We have plans to roll out a comprehensive ERP to facilitate
and, create a common data center for all our units and provide access to all
users at one location. Two months ago, we had contracted SAP for ERP. We have
also tied up with Wipro for the implementation part. The data center is getting
ready and from eight months from now, the hardware will be in place. The
connectivity portion will be given to one of the service providers like BSNL or
Bharti.

On outsourcing

We are under the Ministry of Defense and as a matter of policy, we do not
allow outsourcing to be done to a third party because of the confidentiality of
the information we handle. Presently, we have servers installed at nine
locations where we have the plants. Each of them is secure enough - the
authentication is at the login and the password level now. When we roll out the
ERP, other measures will be taken.

On managing vendor hype

We had given a contract to a leading consulting firm, that, with the help of
IT vendors, did a complete study of the IT infrastructure at BEL and suggested
what needs to be done so that we could truly be an information- savvy company.
ERP packages that met our requirements are few: SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft
among others. We short-listed them and further evaluation was done with the help
of a live data given to these vendors- they were asked to simulate the
conditions that we might come across during the roll out phase and during the
user stage.

On IT Challenges

Look at the defense market. The budget is in excess of 30,000 crores. But a
large part of it is spent for import of items like aircrafts, ammunition, tanks
etc. But a good chunk of it is also for communication, radars, night vision
equipments, sensors etc.

Technology in all these areas are changing so fast that we are gearing up our
own R&D to adopt it in our equipment so that the company can push their
products to the army in competition with global players. Competing with global
players depends on our R&D prowess. Our strength in R&D is undisputed
and BEL's expenditure towards R&D is 6% of the total turnover.