Nirula's: Appetizing IT

Nirula's, a diversified group with a chain of hotels and restaurants which
caters to over 40,000 customers everyday, has lent a distinct flavor to its IT
set-up. It has leveraged the principles of distributed computing to run its
retail show very effectively.

The centralized concept of EDP was a bottleneck in faster access to
information and it was therefore decided to go for decentralized departmental
computerization. In the distributed computing principles each department/outlet
can work as an independent unit but, at the same time, all units synchronize the
relevant information.

Nirula's has over 60 restaurant outlets and three hotel properties. The
applications at the corporate office range from Accounting & Finance,
F&B Controls, HR & Payroll, Purchase, Sales & Inventory to Business
Intelligence and operate at the macro level. Following de-centralization
principle, miniaturized versions of some of these applications along with other
specific applications are deployed at the outlets, hotel properties and
production units, allowing them to function independently. On a daily and adhoc
basis all locations upload the information and systems at the corporate office
are accordingly updated.

At the restaurants, billing is done through in-house developed Point-of-Sale
software, which is capable of being interfaced with the Guest Display Turrets
& kitchen printers and can handle promotional schemes. At the end of the
sale-day, the unit managers are able to generate cashier-wise and item-wise
sales summary and other MIS useful for decision making and strategy planning at
restaurant level. They can prepare Material Variance Report based on raw
materials received and sales done. And based on projected sales for the day
orders to the various Nirula's factories/stores can be generated.

The Property Management System at hotel properties is fully computerized,
from reservation to guest histories, and is linked to the accounting package for
accounts receivable information. The production centers run a customized ERP
System covering many areas: Production Planning & Management, Quality
Management, Recipe Management, Route & Van Management, Sales Management and
Machinery Management.

Since, Nirula's is dealing with food items, which have very short shelf
life, maintaining ideal inventory levels, and planning accordingly are critical
factors. Though, online forms a small portion of Nirula's business, it
effectively complements its offline operations. Its online initiatives include
online hotel reservations and online shopping cart, the latter being
particularly popular among NRIs.

As part of the future plans, Nirula's is working on developing a closed VPN.
Presently, all the locations log in using the Internet cloud, which has
vulnerabilities on the security front. The VPN solution will help take care of
the security concerns. The company is also looking at experimenting with Linux
and is considering it as an alternative OS for both desktop and server
computing.