The Iron Man

When Tata Steel launched the TV commercial, 'We also make steel' in the
1990s, it struck an emotional chord with people and made them see how socially
committed the company is. Incepted in 1907, Tata Steel is Asia's first and
India's biggest integrated private sector steel company. With a slew of iron
ore and coalmines, and state of the art steel manufacturing facilities in
Jamshedpur, the company is one of its kind. The manufacturing infrastructure
cuts across cold rolling mill complexes to finishing facilities.

Varun Jha

Tata Steel's Jamshedpur plant has a capacity of 4 mn tons per year, and
produces flat as well as long products. Currently, to meet growing demands, the
plant is being expanded to accommodate another million. Tata Steel has set up an
ambitious target of 15 mn ton capacity per year by 2010. As part of its
expansion plans the company recently made investments in NatSteel Singapore,
which will expand its footprint in six countries in the Asia Pacific region and
China.

Tata Steel's products include hot and cold rolled coils and sheets,
galvanized sheets, tubes, wire rods, construction re-bars, rings and bearings.
The company has introduced brands like Tata Steelium (the world's first
branded Cold Rolled Steel), Tata Shaktee (Galvanized Corrugated Sheets), Tata
Tiscon (re-bars), Tata Pipes, Tata Bearings, Tata Agrico (hand tools and
implements) and Tata Wiron (galvanized wire products). The Construction Solution
Group explores new avenues for steel utilization by techniques that are
economical. Tata Steel has also developed 'galvannealed' cold rolled steel
with technical assistance from Nippon steel for high-end auto applications.

The IT setup

An industry veteran, Varun Jha has seen IT from its formative years, and
being a domain man he knows his vertical in and out. Jha took over the MIS at
Tata Steel way back in 1994 and, over the years, has put in place key IT
implementations. "IT investments need a full business justification. This
justification can be based on RoI, which is quite suitable for transactional IT
systems. In some other cases IT investments are an essential enabler for
business initiatives. In such cases the justification or RoI should be for the
entire investment on that initiative and not separately for enabling IT systems.
Tata Steel follows a portfolio approach to IT where IT investments are
evaluated as per Gartner's guidelines applicable to the portfolio category to
which the investment belongs," says Jha.

Running a huge enterprise like Tata Steel is a task that calls for a high
degree of planning and execution. Here is where Jha's domain intensive
knowledge helped to conceive and implement various solutions. Unlike other
areas, Steel as a vertical is an extremely complicated terrain. The finished
product happens after various processes-from iron ore to selling to OEMs to
mainstream consumers. The key differentiator of the steel vertical is that it
has two parts to the supply chain. The first part is the converging supply chain
that in its ambit includes raw materials that are converted into crude iron. The
second part is the diverging supply chain. This unique combination of converging
and diverging supply chains is unique to the metal industry. Says Jha, "In
all these IT is used at varying levels and stages."

The company last year embarked on some major initiatives-most significant
being the expansion of SAP to business units that were not covered before. The
company's major business applications run on SAP, which it started rolling out
in 1999 in a phased manner. Says Jha, "Unlike other enterprises, we did not
do a big bang ERP roll out. We started in a phased manner in 1999, and the first
process we did was the order generation and fulfillment part. Subsequently, we
went ahead with the procurement process and the associated accounting
functionalities. The production planning systems for the steel plant was custom
built using the APO module of SAP."

Major IT initiatives and implementations at Tata Steel SAP R/3 in Sales, Procurement, Finance and Accounting, Production Planning Systems for Steel plants using the APO module of SAP Baan at Tisco growth shop and in spares manufacturing unit Workflow, Document Management, Collaboration using Lotus Notes Data Warehousing and Data Mining for manufacturing processes E-procurement, e-auction, and other e-enablement initiatives Knowledge Management and Intranet Videoconferencing, live video streaming for improved communication across geographies VoIP, Wi-Fi, integration with cell phones and PDAs to support mobile computing

In the area of quality, Jha led the implementation of ISO 9001 for the ITS
division of Tata Steel. He also led the effort to get the IT systems of Tata
Steel certified under BS-7799 and BS-15000, as he has been involved with the TQM
efforts of Tata Steel especially in the area of Information Management. He is
also a qualified assessor for assessment under the Tata Business Excellence
Model (patterned after the Malcolm Baldridge Model) within the Tata Group.

Going forward Jha says: "We are right now concentrating on improving our
data centers and the DR facilities. Business intelligence is also in our radar.
Security is also very important to us, as it is paramount in protecting the
enterprise's digital assets. We are putting in place a set of processes and
sensitizing people on security issues." With his plate full of activities,
Varun Jha can be termed as one of the very agile CIOs. He had put in place a
pro-active IT architecture that scales up as per the company's expansion and
growth. Under his leadership Tata Steel has ushered in an enterprise wide change
on a grand scale.

Shrikanth G in
Chennai

Career Line

Running a huge enterprise like Tata Steel is a task that calls for high degree of planning and execution. Here is where Jha's domain intensive knowledge helped to conceive and implement various solutions

Jha holds a BTech degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, and a
Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from XLRI Jamshedpur. He is also
vice chairman of the IT Panel of CII Eastern Region and Chairman of the IT Panel
of the CII Jharkhand Council-in which capacities he has been working closely
with the Jharkhand Government to promote e-governance. He is a life member of
CSI and the past president of the Jamshedpur chapter. Tata Steel has won several
IT awards during Jha's tenure. These include the best IT user award by
Computer Society of India in 2000, Best IT Usage in Manufacturing Industries in
2003 by NASSCOM. In 2004, Dataquest recognized Jha as the Champion CIO. He was
also responsible for entering into a strategic outsourcing contract with IBM in
2000 and with HP in 2003, for managing IT infrastructure.

The contract with IBM has since been benchmarked and renegotiated. During the
same time he led the engagement with Gartner to develop the new IT strategy for
Tata Steel. He is currently engaged in implementing the strategy. Some of the
major initiatives include implementation of i2 for Supply Chain Management, HR
module of SAP, integration of Nat Steel Asia recently acquired by Tata Steel and
planning of IT systems for growth initiatives of Tata Steel. Prior to assuming
the position of CIO, Jha had worked for about 15 years in the Engineering
Division of Tata Steel. During his tenure in the engineering division, he played
a major role in implementing the modernization program of Tata Steel, executing
many projects-large and small. He has worked for four years in the technical
training division of Tata Steel during which he designed and implemented
training programs for new recruits at all levels. He also served for one year as
head of maintenance of electronic systems.