Cloud adoption helps expand office boundaries and improving operational efficiencies
SATYANARAYANA KASTURI
ESSAR PROJECTS
We have already gone live on e-Procurement application which is an online portal to ensure digitisation of the largest and most important business process nearly encompassing all stakeholders, internal and external.
For Essar Projects' Satyanarayana Kasturi, the long-term digitisation goal is to ensure business growth and create a digitally safe and digitally empowered organisation. And he has already made great strides towards it.
The engineering, procurement and construction company has, in the recent past, been engaging into integration of various applications to lay a solid foundation for emerging technologies like IoT, Cloud and Big Data.
Since the time of implementation, this has given a ` 30 crore return on investments. Kasturi has also extended it to include digitisation of invoicing to pay cycle by embedding IoT into the process and enabling complete process from vendor uploading invoices to their payments. This entire process has leveraged on Cloud.
Small improvements such as enabling Cloud access for many systems are now the major drivers for improving operational efficiencies at Essar Projects, the genesis of which aligns with the Essar Group which began as a construction company in 1969, working on marine and offshore contracts and gradually becoming the first Indian company to lay offshore pipelines for ONGC in 1982. “Due to these major steps undertaken to digitise business processes, the office boundaries today have expanded to include global offices,” points out Kasturi.
This was extremely important for an organisation which has its footprint across India, the Middle East, Europe, South-East Asia, Americas and some challenging destinations in Africa and Australasia. The weight of legacy infrastructure could have made things tougher for Kasturi but he used innovative ways to get past the challenges without many problems.
“From the perspective of legacy infrastructure, there is a desperate need to identify laggards from whirlwinds as the legacy is that arm which has to move at a slower pace to carry its weight along. Dual IT is necessarily being adopted to expedite digitisation introduction into business processes so that it can adapt quickly and feed it to legacy at appropriate intervals,” he explains.
To add to this, Kasturi ensures there is an additional support for stakeholders and digitalisation should give additional revenue to business. “We have already operationalised it to ensure successful collaboration between departments and users. Portals developed with workflow facility, documents between multiple departments can be tracked at one place, process gaps have been eliminated and transaction time has been reduced by using digitalised system,” says Kasturi.
He is working with start-ups to gain access to modern technologies before others manage to take lead. “We have joined hands with a big data start-up and will be doing PoC for analytics. We have a target to encourage start-ups in the current financial year,” shares Kasturi.
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