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NEW DELHI: With a pan-India presence in 61 locations, Tata Steel is planning to roll out SAP ERP to all its profit centers and business units.
The company is also in the process of augmenting its infrastructure under the existing IT projects for meeting business needs.
Tata Steel information technology services IT infrastructure head Raghavendra Mathur said, “Most SAP roll-outs would be completed in the current financial year. Major benefits will include phasing out of old technology on which the legacy systems run and also integration of data.”
However, he refused to disclose the investment being made in the SAP rollout.
Throwing light on the IT infrastructure in the company, Mathur said, “The company's IT infrastructure augmentation is linked up with business requirements and strategy. We have a Gigabit Ethernet LAN installed at Jamshedpur and a Wide Area Network using VSAT and VPN connections for providing access to our users countrywide.”
”We are present in several locations across India, where we have our sales and stock points. Providing IT support to them - even for places where there are few desktops/laptops was a major challenge. This still continues to be a challenge. Training such a large user base on the new system is also a major challenge faced by us,” he added.
The company's IT infrastructure assets consist of IBM Mainframe, SAP Server complex, 23 RS/6000 Departmental servers, etc. The company has already deployed 230 Intel servers, three AS/400 systems and 5,750 desktops. It also has a large IT user base comprising of 9500+ email users, 2,000+ Internet users, 1,600+ SAP Users, 300+ Mainframe Users and 250+ Oracle users.
Tata Steel has its own resources for application development and maintenance.
All infrastructure services have been outsourced to IBM (for business systems) and HP (for process control and Plant systems). “Apart from these, we have two WAN service providers, Tatanet for WAN using VSAT technology and VSNL for WAN using VPN technology,” said Mathur.