Sheer willpower

Nanaiah M.C., Senior General Manager – Systems & Processes, Kemwell Pvt. Ltd. looks back at his trainee days, his growth at Kemwell and talks about the projects that he is planning to execute in 2010 including deploying an upgraded ERP system, formulation development and cost cutting initiatives. By Subhankar Kundu

Nanaiah M.C.

Hailing from the ‘Scotland of India’, Coorg, Nanaiah was driven to IT inspired by a friend’s personal computer. The veteran forecasted the booming field of IT as India’s then next happening industry. He has spearheaded numerous IT projects for Kemwell and its group companies.

Gone are the days when India’s definition of IT was constricted to a glimpse of a personal computer. That having been said, there is no denying the fact that it all began with that glimpse where curiosity led him to open up the windows of Windows, unlock the doors of DOS, design racks of servers, fill boxes of storage, turn on the switches of networking, connect to the spectrum of the Internet and of late, fly through the clouds of cloud computing.

This is exactly what had come across Nanaiah’s mind when he first saw his friend’s computer and became curious about the functioning of a computer. The curiosity led him to become a top CIO today as he heads the IT function of pharmaceutical major, Kemwell India Pvt. Ltd. He kept evolving with apt implementation of IT components into Kemwell’s business to streamline operations. He’s still doing the same as he’s busy readying the IT infrastructure which needs to be aligned with the planned expansion of the business.

Nanaiah is no MIT or IIT graduate but has set a perfect example of how ‘premier’ or foreign branded institutes don’t hold any special significance in one’s career when it comes to proving one’s mettle out in the thick of it. All that’s required is sheer drive and willpower to make things happen which he has done. There is no better practical class than to learn in real-life scenarios.

Early days

He came down to Bangalore in 1981 to complete his studies. In 1986, he graduated from Christ College. Parallel to his graduation, the same year, he earned a postgraduate diploma in computer science from St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore.

For the next five years, he kept upgrading his technical skills as he pursued multiple diploma courses like dBase, COBOL etc. from private computer educational institutes such as NIIT and Brilliance in 1987. Following this, he equipped himself with skills in Unix and C from Uttara Training Institute. He also pursued networking and other key IT skills from STG and LAN India.

Starting his career in 1987 as an IT trainee for Bifora Watches for almost a year, in late 1987, he moved to the Kemwell Group as an EDP-in-charge for one of its companies, Billmorie & Co. where he executed the implementation of a Wipro ERP solution called BSS.

Over the years

Billmorie continued with BSS ERP for the next four years. In 1992, Nanaiah decided to develop an in-house ERP solution with the help of Uttara Software which was implemented at a couple of Kemwell group companies—Millipore India and Kemwell International Pvt. Ltd.

The reasons for the migration were obvious. BSS had limited modules with most of the operations running manually. With BSS, only finance and inventory transactions were automated which wasn’t enough to meet the increasingly voluminous information needs.

Nanaiah and his team developed the ERP system with two in-house members and four members from Uttara Software.

Nanaiah said, “We realized that BSS wasn’t working any more for us. Rather than going for yet another off-the-shelf ERP system, we decided to develop one in-house. The businesses got streamlined with most of the departments being automated. Fifty percent of the improvements happened thanks to the effect of online information.”

Manual information management was largely eliminated except plant & maintenance, quality and central excise which were still managed manually.

The in-house ERP dwelt in the systems of Kemwell for about 8-9 years. In 2002, an urgent requirement was felt at Millipore India which led to yet another migration to an improved ERP system. Kemwell shortlisted three major vendors for the migration namely SAP, JD Edwards and Oracle but Nanaiah finally went with JD Edwards as it aptly met the requirements at that point of time. The reasons to go for JD Edwards were primarily the support and the cost.

Then, Kemwell International raised a requirement for upgrading its ERP system which led to the deployment of Ramco Marshall ERP which was again supported by Nanaiah.

He then started concentrating on Kemwell Pvt. Ltd. from 2004-05 onwards and handed over the Millipore IT operations to JD Edwards.

Kemwell needed a robust and modern ERP system as its businesses expanded exponentially. Nanaiah took the call to implement SAP ERP, MySAP 4.7E to be precise, and this system continues to run on Kemwell’s systems.

Taking the increasing requirements and expansion into consideration, Nanaiah has decided to upgrade the ERP system from the existing MYSAP 4.7E to SAP ECC 6.

As part of its plans for expansion, Kemwell will soon come up with a bio-technology plant in Bangalore and an Analytical plus Formulation development setup. The expansion is slated to take place in 2010 itself.

Apart from this, Nanaiah had also implemented SAP ECC 5 for Kemwell’s plant in Sweden for which the data center operations have been outsourced to Reliance’s data center.

IT @Kemwell in 2010

Kemwell’s major investment this year is going to happen in upgrading the ERP system from MySAP 4.7E to ECC 6. Apart from this, Nanaiah has also planned to implement SAP BusinessObjects and Business Information Warehouse (BIW) to help meet its growing MIS requirements.

To address the towering cost issues and to lower power consumption, Kemwell is also planning to implement VMware to cut down infrastructure costs and power consumption as well.

Nanaiah said, “There are some 8-9 servers which are all five years old. To replace them, we would need 16 servers to support the present IT infrastructure after the implementation of the newer systems. However, with VMware, we can bring down the number of servers from 16 to 4.”

Kemwell is evaluating Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Unix systems at present.

Coming to desktops and laptops, Nanaiah said, “We are buying systems with the latest technologies like Windows 7 and the latest processors. Windows Vista was something we couldn’t rely upon.”

There will be some storage upgrades with the company going in for a SAN box.

Among its recent implementations, Kemwell adopted some EMC technologies in data storage. On the application front, Nanaiah ruled out any investments in the near future. The investments are mostly going to happen on the hardware front.

Industry prognosis

Nanaiah forecasts that the industry will largely invest in storage (SAN) in order to bring down costs.

The IT veteran strongly believed that the much talked-about ERP on demand services in the cloud have a long way to go before vendors claim that they are the in-thing. He thought that on-premises infrastructure would remain the preferred option for CIOs in 2010 and did not see CIOs preferring on-demand solutions.

Nanaiah said that spaces like unified communications and video conferencing would pull in major investments as the mandate to trim travel budgets aligned with these communication technologies.

In security, he opined that the investments would happen in multiple layers and one-in-a-box concepts. Apart from this, he also said that data center outsourcing would see a bit of growth.

subhankar.kundu@expressindia.com