 "IFFCO Migrates To Oracle 10g RAC")
The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) is a national level multi-unit cooperative society engaged in the manufacture and marketing of chemical fertilisers. IFFCO has played an important role in the agricultural development of the country by ensuring timely supply of agricultural inputs and services to Indian farmers.
Till date, over 37,000 cooperative societies have registered under IFFCO to help increase foodgrain production in India. In order to integrate all these cooperative societies and centralise the scattered databases, IFFCO has deployed Oracle Database 10g RAC.
Need to consolidate information
IFFCO’s products are distributed through its marketing offices spread across the country. Its 10,000 warehouses and most of the cooperative societies are located in remote areas where connectivity and power supply are uncertain. Hence it was very important to have a secure and centralised database. IFFCO wanted an environment that would enable its users to manage resources to satisfy the various service level arrangements (SLAs).
According to S.C. Mittal, executive director, Management Services and IT, IFFCO, “It was very difficult for us to coordinate with the large number of members, employees and customers. Retrieving information at the right time was the foremost challenge due to connectivity issues. Earlier we were using Oracle 8i, but with the workflow expansion, we felt the need for grid computing along with a scalable, reliable and secure database, to consolidate the available information.”
Deploying Oracle 10g RAC
As IFFCO was already using the Oracle platform, it didn’t take long for the management to decide to opt for this particular solution. The total cost involved in the project was around Rs 2.5 crore, including the annual technical support.
“For the annual technical support, TCS and Path technologies will help us as per the agreement made with Oracle. The overall transition process was smooth. We have consolidated other databases into a single database and our various services are now running on the RAC cluster,” said Mittal.
Better connectivity in remote locations
Oracle 10g RAC has provided radical economic benefits to IFFCO. The deployment has led to increased hardware utilisation, resulting in strategic development initiatives, enhanced services for farmers, and increased customer responsiveness. Information related to the distribution of fertilisers and revenue collection from the remotest of villages is now readily available.
“As far as ROI is concerned, it is very difficult to calculate the direct benefit right now. However, we believe we have already got the ROI. The proof is that in spite of operations on such a vast scale, we have been closing our annual accounts by the first week of closing of every financial year,” said Mittal.