Tryst With Tyres

The popular adage, where the rubber meets the road, stands in testimony to

the successful evolution of MRF into one of the leading tyre manufacturing

companies in the world. From its humble origins in 1946, the company has come a

long way and today, stands as a behemoth. The company manufactures an extensive

range of superior quality tyres in six production facilities in India. MRF

exports its products to over 75 countries worldwide. Such a mammoth set up calls

for high-end state-of-the-art IT systems. A closer look at the company's IT

infrastructure reveals that it has built a lot of legacy applications and

created islands of excellence. This heterogeneity is one of the biggest

challenges the company is facing today. And to create an enterprise wide change

the company has roped in an industry veteran as the CIO. Meet Prince Azariah,

the company's new CIO. Azariah has sketched ambitious plans for MRF's IT and

wants to bring in state-of-the-art IT systems that will equip MRF to meet the

next wave of growth and challenges.

Azariah joined MRF very recently and his key job is aligning the various

business processes at MRF with IT. However, in his view, IT has to be a business

enabler, and not just a change or adoption of new technologies. For instance,

just like the materials manager who sources the best of the raw materials for

the manufacturing, the CIO has to make the best use of the technologies and

create organizational wide change that is appreciated by all. Says Azariah:

“Any new technology brings in a massive cultural change that has to be

managed. When I was working in General Insurance Company (GIC), it was mired in

papers, files, and manual typewriters. In a traditional set up such as GIC, when

the CIO tries to infuse fresh technology, it brings huge change and the CIO has

to successfully engineer that change.” Azariah in the mid 1990s brought

Internet, to GIC, and for the first time the employees visiting cards had

personal email addresses and website IDs. Beginning from such small initiatives

Azariah embarked on an IT drive that saw the development of in-house ERP at GIC.

Before he left GIC, he even prescribed SAP rollout. With the concrete IT

foundations he had laid-GIC today, is in the process of deploying a

best-of-breed ERP solution.

In the Beginning



Azariah claims that he was not an IT man. It so happened that he was

involved with IT since the 1970s. His first job was at IBM as an industrial

engineer in the early 1970's. After some time he moved on to TCS in the mid

1970's when IBM shut shop and winded operations in India. During the 1970s,

TCS was a small entity with just 80 people on board. Later on he moved to

L&T and after a stint he joined the Shipping Corporation as assistant

manager of systems. Then the break-through came in 1981 when he joined CMC in

the marketing department and subsequently, was sent as the lead consultant to

RBI for the Rangarajan Committee on Banks. The Rangarajan Committee was the

first serious effort made towards computerization of the banks. “Here I met a

lot of CEOs from IT companies and learnt a lot,” says Azariah. In CMC he

worked on diverse verticals and also played a key role in the Railway

Reservation System that was developed in the late 1980s. After 10 years at CMC,

he left the organization and joined Origin, a Philips company in 1992. He joined

as the CIO for GIC in 1995. “My job at GIC was to completely transform its IT

infrastructure. When I left, I had made the company ready for ERP.” At GIC

Azariah ushered in various IT initiatives, the development of a homegrown ERP

was one among them.

Rendezvous with Reliance



After leaving his mark in GIC, Azariah joined as CIO for the Reliance

Group's Polyester Sector in 2001. The Polyester sector was least automated

among the Reliance Group of companies. Here his dream of rolling out a

full-fledged ERP got started. Azariah rolled out SAP and the processes started

during 2001. SAP went live towards the end of 2002. Later, he also played a

consultative role in Reliance Infcomm and gave strategic directions for IT

initiatives.

Current Role CIO- MRF

Plans to roll out ERP and bring in enterprise wide change  Past Roles After serving in various IT capacities Prince Azariah has worked in companies such as IBM, TCS, Shipping Corporation, GIC, and Reliance. Through all his roles he has acquired a wealth of information on diverse verticals from BFSI to Petroleum. He is credited with turning around the systems set up at GIC and has engineered an enterprise wide transformation at GIC. As CIO of Reliance Polyester Sector, he successfully deployed SAP and ERP.  He has also consulted on various IT projects and helped in deploying core-banking projects. An avid reader, Azariah unwinds by reading on various subjects.

The New Job



In April 2006 he joined as the CIO of MRF Tyres. According to him there is a

set of goals he intens to do at MRF. On top of his agenda is an ERP rollout that

will integrate the silos of information. It is indeed surprising that the

company being a leader has accumulated a high degree of legacy systems. Azariah

wants to re-engineer the entire IT architecture at MRF in such a way that

banking on IT, the business can significantly thrive. For instance, Azariah

cites a simple example at MRF. Right now the sales team gets the orders from the

dealers and they need to manually go there and get the orders. This according to

Azariah can be automated. Sitting right here in the office, the sales team can

monitor the order status with dealers logging into a system and place the orders

via the system. This is just one example on how IT can become a critical

business enabler.

The Role of the CIO



Much has been talked and written about the role of the CIO. For instance, in

the developing phase of IT, the EDP mangers were confined to a room in the

basement as they were seen as a typically maintaining the hardware. Basically,

the role is one of tweaking and problem solving. But as companies grew, so did

their reliance on IT. New applications were needed and the EDP managers became

the MIS mangers and subsequently blossomed into CIOs. Says Azariah, “A CIO in

order to be successful has to understand the domain and bring in the right kind

of solutions to the table. Also he should develop a comfort level with the

management and needs to convince the top management that such a solution is

needed. For instance, in those days, the MIS managers used to say, “What is

the requirement, I will revert in two weeks. The present day CIO says across the

table to the management what the company wants. They have indeed come a long

way.” Azariah feels that the roles of the CIOs have constantly expanded and he

has today, become a chief investment officer because he drives the investment on

IT.

Being a CIO of one of the leading tyre company is indeed challenging. Prince

Azariah is currently, in the process of doing a due diligence of MRF's

existing IT set up. The company over the years, has created islands of

excellence, but that has resulted in systems not talking to each other. What

Azariah is planning-like an ERP rollout will create a cultural and business

change at MRF? These challenges need to be addressed. Once the proposed ERP

rollout has been completed, MRF would indeed be a very interesting case in

exploring how business has been successfully aligned with IT.

Shrikanth G



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in