"RoI should be for the entire business investment and not on IT only"

Tata Steel, is Asia's first and India's largest integrated private sector

steel company. With technology at its core for manufacturing world class steel,

it is quite but natural that IT is at their helm of affairs and the man driving

the initiative is Varun Jha, CIO of Tata Steel. We bring here a quick short take

with him to understand IT in the organisation.









Can you tell us about IT @ Tata Steel?





During 2004 one of the major initiatives we embarked on was to increase the

footprints of SAP to the processes and to business units that have not been

covered before. This process is currently going on and we expect to finish by

September. Our major business application is on SAP and we are planning to

implement SCM from i2. We also have a Knowledge Management solution and an

Intranet in place. Unlike some of the enterprises, we did not do a big bang ERP

implementation. We started rolling out SAP in a phased manner in 1999. The first

process we took up was the 'Order Generation and Fulfillment' part that was done

in 1999. In 2001 we went ahead with 'Procurement Process' and the associated

accounting functionalities. Currently we are extending SAP into our raw

materials space.

How IT is the key differentiator?



The key differentiator in the metal business is that it has two parts to the

supply chain. The first part is 'converging supply chain' that includes in its

ambit raw materials that are converted into crude iron. The second part is the

diverging supply chain, where the processes take the crude iron into products.

This unique combination of converging and diverging supply chain is unique to

the metal industry. In all these, IT is used at varying levels and stages. We

have outsourced our IT to IBM and HP who take care of all the requirements.

Tell us about your security implementations.



IT security is really about putting in place a set of processes and

sensitizing people to security issues. Tools and technologies, although

necessary and useful, cannot address all the requirements of IT security. Tata

Steel is certified under BS-7799 since early 2003, which provides us with such a

framework of processes.

On your ROI



IT investments need a full business justification. This justification can be

based on RoI-which is quite suitable for transactional IT systems. In some cases

IT investment is 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.

What are your current focus areas?



We are right now concentrating on improving our data centers and the

disaster recovery facilities. Business intelligence is also on our radar.

Meanwhile, we are exploring the ways and means of extending our systems to the

delivery networks. Going forward we would like to re-do our supply chain. It

would be a business driven change, driven by IT.