Steel Industry Should Leverage IT In Every Operation

Sunil Gupta, CIO, Economic Research Unit, Joint Plant Committee, Ministry of Steel, Govt. of India highlights the importance of using IT to overcome challenges in the steel industry and also speaks on the various initiatives undertaken to upgrade the IT infrastructure.

What is the current IT scenario of the Indian steel industry?

The steel industry in India has always been an important vertical not only for the government but also for the foreign investors. Steel plants in India are still using legacy software in India. They are unable to take advantage of IT in order to attract global customers.

With the coming up of some private players in the steel industry in India, the scenario is changing. The government is taking numerous initiatives to help steel plants adopt latest technologies to remain abreast in the competitive environment. These plants are looking for integrated solutions to give a boost to their business.The software vendors should come up with specific solutions for the steel plants as they have for other verticals. There is a need for lot of automation in the industry. The IT applications can help them streamline both supply and process chain that will ultimately help them reduce cost and increase productivity.

What are the challenges faced by you as the head of an IT wing of a government organisation?

Whether a CIO belongs to a private or government organisation, there are always challenges he needs to overcome. The CIOs are constantly facing the problem of reducing cost to the minimum level by maximizing productivity.

People have to change their idea about government organisations not being tech savvy. Rather, the people in government organisations have knowledge on advanced technologies, as government is the biggest spender on various IT projects.

The process of getting sanctions for IT projects is very time consuming and therein lies the real problem. The typical IT infrastructure at the ERU has also created lot of challenges in our day-to-day operations. We are not only in charge of managing our internal IT infrastructure but also the IT infrastructure facilities of the steel plants. Managing so many steel plants along with our own facility is a daunting job. However, technology always always solutions for challenges.

Could you brief us on your plans to upgrade the IT infrastructure?

We have a data centre at Kolkata but now we are planning to set up a disaster recovery site at Delhi in the coming year. There are many projects in the pipeline but they are yet not finalized. We have a legacy database containing various mission critical data on the steel manufacturers, various steel products and other research and statistical data but it has not yet collaborated with the web. We are facing problems whenever we want to access the data. So we are now planning to deploy good database software, which will serve our purpose.

My first priority is to transition the legacy environment smoothly and to deploy new technologies as soon as possible. We are planning to make all the processes IT enabled so that each and every employee can take the advantage of IT to actively contribute to the organisation’s overall growth. Our internal IT team has developed the intelligent database on the steel industry. We also provide training on the latest technologies to our IT staff as well as other users. We are also seriously looking into virtualisation to deploy virtualisation technology in the near future.