The Hindu Business Line : The line's growing

IT has been the banking and financial sectors (apart from, of course the BPO industry) that have so far shown the largest appetite for technology, both domestically and internationally.

But the manufacturing sector seems to be acquiring a taste for technology too. In India, this is on account of the growth of the economy as a whole, of which manufacturing too has played its part.

"The manufacturing sector was a little slow, a bit inward-looking in terms of IT spending," says Jangoo Dalal, Senior Vice-President, Cisco Systems, India and SAARC.

His company was recently selected for infrastructure for Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd's campus-wide connectivity project in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu. This facility is one of the leading ones in the Indian power plant equipment market.

The solution provided by Cisco is an integrated network based on a 10 Gigabit backbone. It includes five core switches, seven distribution switches and a total of 152 Edge Switches deployed throughout the campus.

This project is significant as it is the single largest switching order within the manufacturing vertical in the APAC (Asia Pacific) region, says Dalal. "It represents an overall trend of what is happening in the Indian manufacturing sector." The network is voice-and-audio-ready, and allows for triple-play (voice, data and video).

Manufacturing has been picking up in the last six to nine months in terms of networking and IT spend, says Dalal.

The manufacturing sector has, of course, been active when it comes to its retail front. This financial year, Hughes signed an agreement with Reliance Industries to connect 1,000 of the latter's retail outlets across the country in a deal worth Rs 8 crore.

But the demand from the manufacturing sector for its mainstream activity is itself picking up. ONGC, for example, is embarking on an exercise that will barcode every one of its millions of components and items of use to enable easy identification, order and delivery.

Several manufacturers are going a step further than bar coding and are opting for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) device, often because the international companies to whom they supply insist on it. Nowadays it could be because Indian manufacturers themselves have overseas ambitions.

Currently the demand for manufacturing is for ERP (enterprise resource planning), for RFID, and for PLM (product lifecycle management) as well as Supply Chain Management. For the manufacturing companies, IT leads to easier logistics as well as cost-efficiency.

Recently, Tata Consultancy Services entered into a global partnership with SAP of Germany to offer Adaptive Manufacturing solutions to its customers worldwide. The solutions will help manufacturers to streamline their shop floor systems and business operations.

Another small company in India has developed an ERP system just for the cement industry. Small companies are not just vendors but consumers as well. Dalal of Cisco says there is good demand from the small industries in the Punjab and Himachal belt, in upcoming industrial zones such as Baddi (HP).

kripram@thehindu.co.in

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