Well hoisted with IT

Here’s more from Tushar Mehendale, managing director, ElectroMech who shares with Pratima Harigunani of CyberMedia News how IT has been electrifying Electromech till now, be it connectivity, ERPs or data storage.

How is ElectroMech using technology within logistics model, operations, front-end, back-end and other areas around a business of cranes?

ElectroMech is one of India’s largest integrated industrial crane manufacturers. It manufactures the largest number of cranes as compared to any other crane manufacturer in the country. As a result of this, ElectroMech has a well-established sales network spread out across the country.

In order to manage the team of sales engineer effectively, IT plays a very important role. Each sales engineer is equipped with a laptop loaded with detailed crane configurators, estimation software as well as an interface to tap into the central server at ElectroMech headquarters to get access to reference data.

What's the role of IT in product design, archival, and inventory control?

Being a product company, we have to rely heavily on CAD software like Solid Works for designing and development of our products. Furthermore with the integration of the PLM functionality with SAP, which we plan to implement fully in the next six months, we hope to garner further operational benefits that will go a long way in helping us reduce inventory costs and streamlining the production more effectively.

On one side, cost of data storage is shrinking on a daily basis and the cost of physical space is increasing. Hence it is also becoming more economical to go in for storing all the archival data digitally rather than physically.

Our content management system deployed on the intranet helps us in ensuring availability of this data at the fingertips of the employees concerned.

What are the specific enterprise applications being used at the company?

ElectroMech has recently deployed SAP and has managed to streamline its business processes in an extremely efficient manner. The cross-functional visibility afforded by this ERP package is turning the decision making process into a breeze.

Furthermore, ElectroMech has also deployed an in-house developed CRM system for ensuring that the complete sales team is on one platform and effective sharing of data becomes possible.

Then, on the company intranet, we have also deployed a referencing system that stores all the data related to pertinent sales orders which allows quick and easy access to the different departments like QA, accounts, production, design and sales processing all important documents pertaining to that particular order.

What's the company's stake on outsourcing as a productivity and IT strategy?

It makes prudent sense to outsource the complete implementation of IT services. IT is not our core competency and we are happy manufacturing cranes. As a result it does not make sense for us to develop an in-house team capable of developing solutions and carrying out complicated implementations.

We prefer to have our IT organization structure very lean where we look into only the overall system administration and outsource the rest of the activity to the experts.

So IT is an imperative?

Given the complex and competitive nature of business today, it becomes extremely necessary to have all the details of one's business at your fingertips and be able to run complex ‘what-if’ scenarios and arrive at decisions. These decisions can make or break the business.

In the absence of a strong IT backbone, the decision-making process becomes extremely cumbersome and becomes more subjective rather than objective. Further, deployment of a well-designed and thought-out IT backbone ensures effective implementation of control systems and helps in proper and judicious management of the organization.

Effective data collation also lends itself to proper cost analysis and helps in making the company more competitive and agile. We operate across different offices all over the country as well as abroad and hence it becomes very important to have a good IT backbone to ensure effective communications. Hence IT is an imperative aspect of the organization rather than it being an add-on feature.