Based out of Kota, Rajasthan, Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited is a very popular fertiliser manufacturer and between its two manufacturing plants, the company produces about 2 million tonnes of urea per annum. These plants use state-of-the-art technology including that from Denmark, Italy, United States and Japan. Chambal Fertilisers has a marketing network in ten states across central, western and northern India. With 10 regional offices, 1300 dealers and around 20,000 village-level outlets, its distribution penetrates even remote areas. The Company has donned the mantle of providing all agri-products through a “single window” to enable the farmer to buy all products from one source. The Company dealers provide Urea and other agri-inputs like DAP (Di-ammonium Phosphate), MOP (Murate of Potash), SSP (Single Super Phosphate), pesticides and seeds.

These complex tasks were being performed with a fairly complex IT network that encompassed all the dealer networks, product segments, and sales offices. In course of time, the company realized that the IT was growing old and costing more to maintain and run – in simpler words, it suffered from the common symptoms of legacy IT environment. Too disparate and costly, it became a hindrance to the company’s profits.

The company recently turned to data center consolidation and storage virtualization with the integration of IBM DB2 and SAP with HP Integrity Servers running HP-UX 11i v2. Storage virtualisation with HP StorageWorks in addition to Enterprise Virtual Array is currently deployed and functional.

Besides reduction in IT management complexity, the company claims that business growth has indirectly been accelerated. Improved credit controls allow the company to better manage revenues, assisting decision making, reducing time-to-market of products and services which directly translates to strengthening of customer relationships. Centralization of resources has made monitoring easier and increased flexibility has been achieved to meet future business and scaleability needs.

After the deployment, the single biggest plausible benefit has been the fact that our company now can monitor all its activities at one centralized location ensuring that leakages don’t occur. Also, we now have a clearer idea of customer needs enabling us to react to their needs faster. All this put together has ensured that business growth is more aligned and accelerated. The difference between the earlier scenario and the current one that is IT-enabled is very evident and allows the company to make future goals and vision more precise.
--V.S. Rao, Manager – IT, Chambal Fertilisers and Chemicals Limited