BANGALORE, INDIA: One of the largest steel producers of India, the Rs 6000 crore Jindal Stainless, is soon going to boast of the largest integrated stainless steel complexes with an investment of over Rs 8000 crore, close Bhubaneshewar in northern India. Spread over an area of 600 acres the state-of-art plant, which will start operations in 2009, will include mines to commercial functions. It will also include a power plant for individual consumption as well as for public utility. 

Needless to say, with the new plant, the company's production capacity will increase by leaps and bounds to 1.6 million tonnes per annum which will in turn boost its bottom line  to Rs. 19,000 crore. 

According to Ajay Dhir, Chief Information Officer, Jindal Stainless, sixty percent of the investment will be accorded to technology and infrastructure. "We are using high-level automation and investment using SAP. A project systems module is also being set up there," said Dhir in an interview with CIOL.

Manufacturing with technology

While most manufacturing companies are trying to figure out a way of connecting plant level automation to the ERP system for real-time data, Jindal Stainless is one up by successfully integrating the PLC to its SAP system in it coal-rolling division at Hisar. The company has integrated the manufacturing operations of the Plant to SAP using SAP MII (Manufacturing Intelligence and Integration) to enable management reporting and transparency in the manufacturing processes. The plant to Business Integration involves the interfacing Plant PLCs with SAP R/3 Enterprise 4.7, using SAP MII.

Says Dhir, "Steel needs a high level of automation and we have successfully connected the plant automation to the ERP for real-time data. We are one of the first organizations to have deployed this product and gone live successfully, in India. This is now a prime reference site for MII for SAP India as very few companies have adopted this contemporary technology so early and successfully."

While earlier, it involved collecting readings from the PLC and compiling them, now the data is collected automatically and in real-time. Talking about operational benefits, visibility of the manufacturing processes across the plant on local LAN is one of the biggest advantages, according to Dhir. "There is transparency in the manufacturing process because the data is coming directly from the source. The data is dependable because there is no human intervention," he says.

Enabling real-time online monitoring of the manufacturing processes has its pluses as well. The operation managers can plan in advance in a proactive manner rather than take a reactive approach.

Of course, automation of this level cannot come cheap, having spent more than a crore on the implementation. But, it would hardly made a dent in the company's IT budget which is in the range of Rs 10 – 20 crore.

Having taken fourteen months to complete, each project brings its own challenges and Dhir also had to overcome the challenge of creating a buy-in for the project. The second challenge according to him was creating the mindset—building trust and reliability in the MIS system.

Talking about some of his on-going projects, the company is building a portal to connect to its customers and suppliers for centralized purchasing orders. The website will be able to connect to Procter & Gamble's worldwide ordering system and invoicing system.

Another project which is in the process of stabilizing is a Coil tracking system for its cold rolling division. The bar coded coils are tracked using a wireless scanner which passes on information about stock and location to the system.