IT is business within business: Elsaasser

The company's India center employs 20 percent of the

company's worldwide IT workforce does pretty significant support of the

company's engineering systems. In an interview with Pragati Simlote of

CyberMedia News, Elsaasser talks about the use of IT in the Timken and India's

contribution in the overall IT processes at the company.

Tell us something about Timken and your operations

in India?






Timken manufactures tapered roller bearings and mechanical seamless steel tubing
and this year we expect to be close to a $5 billion company. We are based out of

the US but operate in US, China, India and Europe. Our major product lines are

bearings and steel.






Timken India Ltd, a subsidiary of The Timken Company, provides friction
management solutions for a wide range of industry applications across the globe.

Besides this we also have the Timken Engineering and Research — India (TER-I),

which is situated in Bangalore. Our Bangalore organization has about 330 people.

We do IT support and corporate shared services out of the center. Under

corporate shared services, we have insourced some of Timken's services like

account receivables, accounts payable, US payroll, etc. to our Indian center.






We also have a product technology group, which does application engineering and
product testing and product development for the Indian market because we see

India as such an important market that we need to be close to our customers.






Then we have a manufacturing technology group that does low cost bearing
manufacturing process. So we are trying to design new bearing manufacturing

process at a lower cost using the Indian engineering machine tools. Plus we do

global manufacturing technologies also.






What is the role of TER-I in the overall functioning of the company?





Our IT organization is a global organization employing 500 people worldwide. TER-I
houses 20 percent of Timken's global IT force. The facility is expected to

play an important role in implementing IT for Timken. Built with an investment

of around $8.5m in the facility, the facility was purpose built for the company

and was inaugurated in April 2004.






Our IT associates in Bangalore are divided into two major areas. One group
supports our global infrastructure —IT infrastructure, telecom, network

monitoring, etc. The other group is the application group, which works with our

associates around the world on building and improving various IT applications.

Our associates are also working on a global SAP implementation called Project

ONE, which started at the beginning of this year.






What role does IT play in any organization?





IT is like a business within business. It has three key activities: Running the
key operations like telecom, network, etc., application development for project

delivery and consulting with our internal customers in terms of what they want

to do and how IT can do it.






Applying IT to a business problem is not always easy. Good dialogue between
users and IT people is needed. We need IT people who understand business and

business people who have some appreciation for IT. In Timken, we have succeeded

to some extent in applying IT to business, but I think we can still do better.






Going forward, what would be TER-I's role in IT implementation at Timken? We
do pretty significant support of our engineering systems from India. We do

infrastructure support, application support, web development, some support of

our Timken legacy systems, etc. Going forward the IT associates in India will

play an important role as they are now getting involved in SAP implementation.

We have launched a global SAP implementation called Project ONE and have bought

the mySAP business suite, which uses NetWeaver technology. In the process of

this global implementation, Indian associates are now learning new technologies

like SAP Basis, SAP NetWeaver, etc.






What kind of skill sets do you look at while employing in India?





We look at two primary skills, as the Indian center is the primary service
provider to our worldwide customers apart from Timken itself. One would be the

mechanical engineering skill and the second is strong IT skills. We also look

for people with project management skills.






These skill sets in India are not difficult to find. But with wage inflation and
higher attrition, we need more students from universities to come and join the

industry and work towards attracting and retaining them with the company.