A strategic thinker wearing many hats

At SCL-TVS Motors, T G Dhandapani is at the helm of affairs handling business of IT—a potentially Rs 100 crore business (present Rs 50 crore), single handedly. He believes that the adoption of lean manufacturing systems is growing among manufacturers of all sizes and it can help companies survive recession—by keeping their inventories and wastages low. By Akhtar Pasha

T G Dhandapani is a Chartered Accountant having more than 28 years of professional experience in the fields of Finance, Business planning, Operations, Projects and IT in TVS Group. He is handling IT for Sundaram Clayton/ TVS Motor Group of companies for past nine years. As Corporate CIO for SCL-TVS Group, he is responsible for IT initiatives and maintenance of IT in seven manufacturing companies including TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton. He has the distinction of carrying out 10 successful SAP implementations under his able leadership. Further, a new business model has been developed titled ‘enabled oil business’ in 2007 where entire commercial processes have been automated end-to-end using IT, is another feather is his hat.

Before coming in to IT, Dhandpani had worked in Finance, Operations, Business planning and Projects within TVS group for 19 years. As Financial Controller he implemented Activity Based Costing and Cost Deployment processes in Sundaram Clayton and TVS Motors. As Project Head, he was responsible for developing a green field two wheeler plant in Mysore with a production capacity of 500 thousands way back during 1997-2000.

Lean manufacturing, electronic Kanban, digitization of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), digitization of New Product Development (NPD - PLM) process, electronic collaboration with suppliers and customers, are some of his major achievements in IT domain. He has also facilitated in-house developed Dealer Management System—an ERP for TVS Motor Dealers, which saw as many as 600 dealers adopting the system across India and abroad.

Most recent significant IT investments:

Manufacturing Execution System and Data Acquisition System

Under this leadership, TVS-Motor designed a Data Acquisition System (DAS) that captures process parameters from PLC or CNCs of the machines and pushes it to SQL database. The project was commenced with objective of making all the required information online without any manual intervention by capturing data directly from source [related with quality issues that require statistical analysis]. Touch screen-based digital display system in every line serves as dashboard on QCD (Quality Cost Delivery) parameters. Also, process parameters that influence the quality of products are also directly captured from the machine. (For example RPM, Clamping pressure, temperature, etc.) and the benefits were observed in areas of productivity, cost and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Similarly, the in-house developed Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software that produces—dashboards, alerts (through mail and SMS) to operating executives. In order to measure process parameter continuously in areas of productivity, quality and IT cost has been integrated in to the manufacturing system. “These two projects helped us in capturing of the data for these parameters online directly from the machine and display the status through dashboards for the operating managers,” said Dhandapani.

Additionally, dashboards help the operating managers to carry out PDCAs (Plan, Do, Check and Act) in a shorter cycle. The dashboards impel the managers to take corrective/preventive action. Operating managers monitor their KRAs such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), quality online.

TVS-M has been practicing lean manufacturing principles in it all four manufacturing plants. Dhandapani explained, “Three fundamental components of lean manufacturing systems should come together to deliver the end results—foundations, management and countermeasures. Whenever the economy turns sour, manufacturers inevitably turn to cost-cutting measures to help conserve capital. Lean manufacturing would help in reducing waste in production and execution, is a proven mechanism for cutting costs.”

Though SCL-TVS Motors derived financial benefits on practicing lean manufacturing, there were a few open challenges. The first one was the time spent on collecting data—it’s a huge task. The long time spent has also reflected on quality of data in terms of accuracy. The second challenge was in terms of availability of data on time for corrective action. The delay in collection of data had resulted in delay in corrective action. The third one was the standardization of lean practices across all plants all time. Sometime it was observed that the established manual processes were not followed whenever there were changes in supervisory leaderships.

Open source dashboards for operating executives

According to Dhandapani, the success of IT usage lies in its simplicity. Operating managers expect the information to flow freely, using tools that are as simple as ATM. Sundaram-Clayton used Open Source to develop dashboard for reporting using with backend ERP. Touch screens were provided in respective discussion rooms where reviews are conducted using dashboards. Following benefits were observed:

• Time taken for preparation of reviews reduced
• Single source of data ensures visibility of all parameters for discussion
• Backend system for updating transaction is hastened
• By virtue of simplicity these dashboards have improved the usage of IT

Technologies that will matter in 2010

Dhandapani's top priority for his organization is to help in increasing the business productivity, reduce costs, speed up time to market and increase the efficiency in all respect.

Dhandapani felt that IT will play a key role in CEOs' plans to recover from the recession, as their focus shifts from cost control to revenue growth. “A switch in focus from cost to revenue will reshape business-change priorities and in turn will impact the IT project portfolios. Therefore as a Group CIO, I have to re-priorities some key IT projects during 2010 as the business cycle starts to turn. Having said that I feel that virtualization, BI, green IT, unified communications are some of key technologies that will continue to show positive momentum in 2010 as well,” he added.

Virtualization

Clearly one technology that dominated even during the recession and cash crunch period was virtualization and it made a significant traction in 2009. Dhandapani attributed the traction in virtualization and said, "It [virtualization] reduces operating costs if not in terms of investment. Additionally, many organizations are turning to server virtualization as a way to extend their data center space, reduce power and cooling, and improve their capital expenditures related to servers. There are economic benefits of data center consolidation, storage consolidation, and server virtualization. CIOs have ventured into this in non-core areas to gain experience."

There are two strong reasons why this technology would be more popular in 2010, said Dhandapani.

• Investment in IT due to slow down was lower in 2009. As economy is looking up, the new investment, in terms of ‘replacement’ will be more as the assets would have sweat for one extended year due to postponement of spending in 2009.
• Having gained experienced in non-core areas, CIOs will venture this technology in 2010.

Cloud computing

There has been too much attention given to cloud computing these days without any thought on delivery model, applications and infrastructure required to delivery it. Nevertheless Dhandapani felt that cloud computing will be tried out in the IT industry especially in areas where application is matured and standardized. “Pricing model and security assurance of the service providers would decide the success of cloud computing. To start with private cloud will be more popular,” he stated.

Unified communications

Due to high cost of VoIP solutions, this technology was tried more in green field projects. If the IT spending commensurate with economic growth, Dhandapani said we may observe more spending in this technology going forward.

Business Intelligence

Today BI has emerged the most powerful application that a CIO can deliver to business decision-makers. Large organizations that have adopted on transactional systems in the past, have loads of business data coming from various departments and channels that can be mined to get more insights on their enterprise-wise operations and take strategic business decisions. He however added the problem is that there aren't as many good ways to dig into that data and quickly and easily turn it into actionable reports, graphs, and dashboards. Speed is the key that is making the data easily accessible to the employees, who need that data to make better decisions. But going forward we would see many BI projects in 2010, which will help the EAS market to grow further.

Green IT

Energy efficiency or ‘green’ products are simply for the practical advantages in energy savings. CIOs as part of their social responsibility have adopted green technology while designing new data center or procurement of servers. A socially conscious CEO may have funds to support some IT changes that result in a greener company.

Energy saving will be everybody's business and IT is not an exception to that. Apart from energy, CIOs will also look for environment friendly fire suppression agents, traditionally an over looked areas.

Energy will be one of the pre-eminent public concerns of the next decade and energy conservation will be an important part of the discussion. IT departments need to act now to start measuring the energy consumption of IT infrastructure and looking for strategic opportunities to reduce it, before they are forced to act due to government intervention.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com