1) How do you think digitalisation is changing the landscape of Indian manufacturing?
In the last couple of years, manufacturing has emerged as a high growth sector in India, with potential to reach US$ 1 trillion by 2025, per a study by IBEF. And digitalization will have a large role to play in helping our industry get there.
In the current challenging situation, the digital landscape is constantly evolving. Industries want to bring back normalcy at the earliest. Manufacturers are keen to fast-track innovation and technology modernization to streamline processes, help usher in manufacturing excellence and increase operational efficiencies. They realize the need to add more value with a quicker turnaround time. This is also triggered by rapid changes in consumer expectations and technology improvements.
Digitalization is not only reducing the manufacturing cycle time and dependence on manual processes (thereby minimizing human errors); it’s also helping manufacturers improve productivity, accuracy, enhance quality. Digitalization also has a direct impact on businesses, their suppliers, customers, and other third parties. In summary, digitalization brings numerous advantages, such as helping businesses adapt to changes faster, or even anticipate changes before they occur – all crucially important to manufacturing in an agile economy.
2) Tell us about your organization’s digital strategy and innovation roadmap. What kind of technology solutions have you adopted in this journey?
During these challenging times, we are focusing more on in-house digital initiatives involving various internal stakeholders. We’ve also implemented specific initiatives to better capture machine data to help the operations and maintenance teams analyze and forecast better. Such in-house initiatives are proving to be very helpful in bringing in manufacturing excellence and is unlocking significant value for the business.
We wanted to expedite our innovation/digitalization efforts to add value to our business, but were constrained by an on premise IT setup, with application continuity, availability and scaling challenges. Also, managing our own datacenter was becoming a drain on our resources and efficiency. That’s when we decided to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for its superior cloud economics – in addition to providing enterprise-grade capabilities such as advanced security, guaranteed high performance and high availability. Oracle’s universal credits model helps us to consume second generation cloud services while we pay only for what we use, enabling us in cost rationalization.
3) How have these digital efforts made a difference to your business and to your end customers? In particular, what business benefits have you seen?
Lower cost of ownership and reduced maintenance costs have been a welcome benefit. By using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we anticipate that along with a 30% improvement in performance, the switch to an OPEX IT model will help us realize upfront cost savings to the tune of 20 to 30%. More importantly, this will help us to concentrate now furthermore on our core business and not get bogged down with managing routine IT tasks.
Moreover, after moving to Oracle cloud, we have witnessed an enhanced internal customer experience – be it speed, high application availability and effectively completing tasks on time. We had a few users who were apprehensive of using critical applications extensively in our previous IT set-up (owing to skepticism on high availability of our previous IT set-up). But now, after making the transition, our stakeholders’ confidence levels have improved tremendously with an always-on cloud model with high availability and resiliency. We’ve also got a more secure cloud environment with Oracle.