Leading Manufacturing Companies – Escorts group

As group CIO, Kumar’s primary role is to ensure that he aligns IT with business needs. As group CIO, he is required to have an insight into the problems and the plans that will enable him to find solutions quickly.
There is a regular need to evaluate emerging technologies for understanding the business benefits and evolve IT as an enabler rather than as a support and technology department. Over the years, he has helped the company streamline the IT map and now the question he is busy addressing is increasing the efficiency of manufacturing. There is a need to reduce cost, like any other company. Secondly, Kumar is keen to increase the productivity of manpower deployed on the shop floor. The third point of focus for the company is to ensure that they offer customers extremely high quality products and one that offers a lifetime of experience. The team at the company has spent much time and investment on attending to this.
In terms of keeping up with updates and new technologies, Kumar conducts regular PUCs with different vendors. Evaluations are an ongoing process, be it in data analytics, IoT integration, shop floor to top floor integrations, among the myriad things that are required. He believes that for the company to benefit overall, automating processes is key and displaying that process to the employees at large helps them in sequencing their production. The steps that he has taken have helped Escorts take its manufacturing a few notches higher and the company is seeing better results.
Over last couple of years, Escorts has been reducing its raw material costs, helping expand margins. Raw materials as a percentage of sales now cost 66.8% in H1 FY18, compared with 73% in FY14. The first leg of profitability expansion was focused on gross margins.