Reaping Mobile Benefits

Giving a peek into its highly automated set up, V Srinivas, CIO, Nagarjuna

Fertilizers and Chemicals says, "In order to connect our geographically

dispersed sales and marketing teams, we have decided to roll out an in-house

developed mobility application for connecting the teams to our central

application." The Hyderabad based company has been operational since 1985, and

is the flagship company of Nagarjuna Group with an asset base of around Rs 21 bn.

The last one year has been hectic for Srinivas as an in-house mobility

application was being developed graduating from PDA based solution to a mini

laptop based system. Earlier we were using SMS based application with online

integration to SAP; however the sales team was facing issues with push and pull.

Apart from difficulty in submitting relevant sales information; extracting

information from the central application was also proving to be cumbersome.

Therefore, it was decided to equip the salesforce and logistics team with

mini laptops equipped with data cards. Thus, connecting them to the central

application resulted in improving the efficiency of the salesforce and reducing

operational issues.

Canteen Automation



Another interesting deployment done by NFCL is the Canteen Automation System

for automating the canteen coupon usage. With more than a thousand employees on

its premises, issuance of canteen coupons is a mammoth task. Earlier each coupon

issued had to be manually kept track of as payments to the canteen operator were

issued according to the coupons being used.

Quips Srinivas, "Last year we fully automated our canteen coupon system

moving on from barcode cards to biometric/RFID cards issued to employees. These

biometric cards are issued to all visitors to our site including our employees,

and they can be used for attendance management as well as swiping in the

canteen. Every time a card is swiped, this is debited to our accounts

department."

Virtualizing the Cloud



Technology has become a core component of the business strategy at NFCL,

since fertilizer is a controlled sector and one needs to constantly look at ways

to increase the bottomline.

For instance, NFCL has gone ahead with virtualization moving from fifty

servers to only two blade servers. "We are perhaps the only fertilizer company

to have deployed different types of virtualization. We can see clear cost

benefits after this deployment in terms of power saving of up to 30%," adds

Srinivas.

NFCL also has its private cloud for its Intranet based application, wherein

daily production reports along with MIS reports generated is posted online.

Employees too can access a host of applications including online PF application

forms for applying for PF loans, etc.

Divulging details about their future initiatives, Srinivas says, "We are now

looking at entering the GIS/GPS space and integrating some of the web 2.0

applications with it. In addition to this, we will also be automating our

logistics related supplier relationship modules for connecting all our suppliers

online."

Stuti Das



stutid@cybermedia.co.in