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L&T Technology's 6 big bets that will shape 'Factory of the Future': Anand Vaitheeswaran
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SME Times News Bureau | 10 Dec, 2021
Last fiscal, manufacturing constituted around 17.5 per cent of India's GDP versus 15.3 per cent two decades ago.
Over
the next decade, this share may move significantly higher with
policymaking focusing on 'Make in India' and Indian enterprises
embracing digital technologies to achieve the target of becoming a
global manufacturing hub.
New technologies are profoundly changing industrial production, giving rise to "the factory of the future".
IANS
spoke to Anand Vaitheeswaran, CIO at L&T Technology Services
Limited (LTTS), to understand how Indian manufacturing is evolving given
the increasingly rapid adoption of intelligent automation, data
analytics and IoT as well as LTTS's six big bets which will shape the
industry of tomorrow.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: The
Indian IT industry is riding high on a digital transformation wave as
businesses look to get more agile and resilient. Can you tell us about
the trends you are seeing in what your customers will demand over the
next 2-3 years?
When we discuss digital transformation, we need
to understand that it is not a commodity but a customer-sentiment driven
change. Digital transformation implies tectonic shifts in the way
organisations build and utilise resources and modify its operations.
Keeping up with these customer demands has become more crucial than ever
for every industry around the world. Since 2020, the world has marked
the rapid shift in customer demand, with more client focus on
digitisation of "experiences".
We believe that these 6 big bets
-- Electric Autonomous Connected Vehicles (EACV), 5G, Digital Products
and AI, Digital Manufacturing, Med Tech and Sustainability -- will shape
the industry of tomorrow, help us to scale and enable our engineers to
stay ahead of the curve.
Our various businesses also have a
mandate to improve LTTS' technology quotient and build reusable assets
that can be our differentiator in the marketplace.
Q: How did Covid play the role of a catalyst in accelerating your digital transformation journey?
After
the pandemic hit, with the majority of our workforce operating
remotely, our focus shifted to the safety of employees while maintaining
the highest levels of productivity.
We devised ways and means to
make the employees productive from wherever they connected through
collaboration platforms that enabled them to connect with their teams
and the organisations, chatbots to help with certain repetitive actions
or simple applications that enabled our employees to be effective in
delivering our commitments towards customers. We also invested in
cybersecurity tools and processes that ensured us to tackle malicious
threats.
During this lockdown, we also developed and launched the
'WFX App' that helped with hotdesking and social distancing at the
workplace. We deployed technology such as thermal scanning & 'Care
App' to ensure those who were entering office buildings were healthy and
safe.
Q: Are Indian businesses prepared for the Factory of the
Future? How do you see the manufacturing landscape in 5 years from now
given increasing adoption of intelligent automation, data analytics and
IoT?
At a global level, many large Indian businesses are well
prepared to align with the 'Factory of the Future', while many others
are still planning to do so.
However, the adoption of advanced
digital manufacturing solutions has not been uniform across sectors,
such as in food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, mining and water
& waste water, where investments in automation solutions have not
kept pace with global norms. On the other hand, pharma and healthcare
segments have been able to achieve a good level of automation, with the
oil & gas and automotive industries being at par with global trends.
In
this scenario, companies who are aligned to reap the benefits of being
'Factory of the Future' will have smarter machines, closed loop
controls, significant unmanned operations, network of reliable systems
on cloud, heavy use of Robots/Cobots/Drones/AGVs, IoT platforms.
Q: What are the must have qualities of a successful CIO/CTO today?
With
the digital overtaking the physical platforms as the primary
communication and collaboration platforms, IT has taken the
centre-stage. The role of a CIO has crystallised during the pandemic -
from being a technology leader to a cross-functional business leader.
To
be on the top of a rapidly changing technology landscape, a CIO must
have an agile and growth-centric mindset - continuously learning the
latest technologies not just in the enterprise landscape, but across the
spectrum.
One of the key qualities of a CIO is to operate in a
product model of work, instead of a project-based model, while
considering the revenue generation from IT towards the organisation. The
ability to experiment and demonstrate quick decision making are
important skill sets for a CIO.
Q: What did cloud technology enable you to do that you couldn't do before?
Owing
to the pandemic which got us to rethink on WFX (Work from Anywhere), it
would not be possible to sustain if we did not have cloud technologies.
Under our umbrella business process transformation programme, all teams
could work from anywhere to ensure timely deliveries. Critical
workloads were secured, scaled up and were accessible from anywhere.
Thanks
to AWS, we could focus more on agility and deliver both to employees
and customers. For example, we had provisioned the AMD processor but we
realised during the cyclic load that we needed a better processor. With
great support from AWS, we changed the same without downtime. Not just
that, we were able to increase IOPS on the fly leading to effective use
of resources.
If not for such features, we would not have been
able to design during peak load without burdening other resources.
Availability of business-critical applications, one click addition or
resources were made possible. Additionally, in terms of management
efficiency - the way we could use resources, on demand scaling based on
workloads meant we were on track to effectively use the investment. With
the geographical selection of the workload, LTTS reduced latency for
its US Operations to access storage from AWS.
All
business-critical workloads at LTTS are currently functioning on AWS.
Key among them include ERP, Project & Quality Management platform,
Data Lake and analytics platform. We also have some of our customer
projects running on AWS. Additionally, proof of concepts using GovCloud
for specific projects are in the pipeline and will be unveiled soon.
Our entire procurement cycle and wait lead time for arrival of hardware was eliminated, thus reducing our 'time to deploy'.
Lastly,
instead of blocking capital expenses we were able to leverage the Pay
as you go Model and remained agile to the business needs leveraging
cloud.
Q: How did cloud help you in terms of risk and compliance?
Risks
can be related to availability of workloads and can effectively be
managed by placing workloads in two different availability zones.
Similarly, compliance needs related to data privacy like restriction of
data movements, can be planned and adopted better.
On cyber security, AWS provided the Trust Advisor report which helped in managing all security aspects.
Q: How is technology enabling your business to drive societal impact?
LTTS
has a vision to help build a more sustainable world. We leverage our
deep engineering DNA and innovation-mindset and support customers to
expand the use of renewable energy, drive water conservation measures,
reduce carbon emissions, and develop Net Zero products.
To that
effect, we are also using cloud services, with multi-cloud and hybrid
cloud environments as part of our ongoing digital transformations.
Cloud-based data management helps support ESG programmes by automating
processes and standardising data -- which in turn improves transparency
within the organisation as leaders try to understand the diverse social
and environmental risks.
The ESG data not only helps to know
about greenhouse gas emissions and waste management but also manage
resources, identify potential risks and maintain compliance.
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