Starting with just a little electrical retail shop in Mumbai a handful of decades back, Polycab has evolved into a single of India’s major companies of cables and wires and allied solutions. It has lately ventured into customer electrical solutions such as fans, switches, switchgear, LED lights and luminaries, solar inverters and pumps.
With 18% industry share, Polycab is on a mission to accelerate company development. Its 30-member robust IT group has played a important function in Polycab’s technologies modernisation, innovation and development journey. Says Vivek Khanna, executive-president and CIO, Polycab India, “Technology has contributed significantly towards improving our overall performance. These include customer experience, ease of working, operational efficiencies, pace of manufacturing and process automation, amongst others. As a result, we have been able to greatly optimise our resources overall.”
Digital-initial mindset
Looking to transform into a digital-initial company, Polycab has stepped up concentrate on digitalisation in the final 2-3 years. Every company function is supported with some regular or custom-constructed technologies stack, and all of them have been integrated into the core ERP platform. “Essentially, we are trying to digitalise our core. We started with stabilising our ERP system, which also includes critical business processes. Another key focus is driving advanced automation of some of our processes,” adds Khanna.
Data-driven choices
Polycab is now in a superior position to unearth deeper insights from information to help superior company choices, one thing the IT group expects will additional strengthen the company’s digital capabilities. By capturing precise information at supply and interlinking with essential applications and functions, seamless movement of information all through Polycab has come to be probable.
A big project for the IT group was developing a robust dealer management platform to usher in higher transparency. “With the platform now live, our distributors are able to book sales orders, view status on outstandings, check relevant price lists and catalogues, retrieve balance information, etc.,— essentially covering all elements that channel partners need support for from a manufacturing organisation. This portal today accounts for over 80% of our overall orders booked via channel sales,” says Khanna.
Faster innovation with cloud
The cables and wires firm has turned to the cloud to accelerate innovation and development. Polycab began its cloud journey by moving its disaster recovery atmosphere for Oracle ERP to the second generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). “With OCI, we have realised superior cloud economics, improved flexibility and experienced easy scalability. Encouraged by this success, we have started using OCI for our entire testing environment. This has helped us create workloads faster. Further, owing to easy scaling features, we have also saved tremendously on our TestQA costs,” he adds.
Polycab is also making use of Oracle Mobile Supply Chain Application (MSCA) to allow actual time information capture from the shopfloor. It is now extending this application to the rest of its units and depots. It has began making use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) to superior streamline processes and additional enhance operations. Among the initial AI-primarily based applications rolled out for customers are a sensible travel and expense management answer. It plans to use AI/ML, chatbots far more broadly in the coming months, specially in creating client-facing applications far more intelligent and user-friendly. Currently, the IT group is searching to extend AI/ML capabilities to the secondary sales platform and document management technique to additional enhance approach efficiencies. Next on the cards is digitalising warehouse and transportation management systems, making use of RFID and GPRS technologies.