The popular adage, where the rubber meets the road, stands in testimony to the successful evolution of MRF into one of the leading tyre manufacturing companies in the world. From its humble origins in 1946, the company has come a long way and today, stands as a behemoth. The company manufactures an extensive range of superior quality tyres in six production facilities in India. MRF exports its products to over 75 countries worldwide. Such a mammoth set up calls for high-end state-of-the-art IT systems. A closer look at the company's IT infrastructure reveals that it has built a lot of legacy applications and created islands of excellence. This heterogeneity is one of the biggest challenges the company is facing today. And to create an enterprise wide change the company has roped in an industry veteran as the CIO. Meet Prince Azariah, the company's new CIO. Azariah has sketched ambitious plans for MRF's IT and wants to bring in state-of-the-art IT systems that will equip MRF to meet the next wave of growth and challenges.

Azariah joined MRF very recently and his key job is aligning the various business processes at MRF with IT. However, in his view, IT has to be a business enabler, and not just a change or adoption of new technologies. For instance, just like the materials manager who sources the best of the raw materials for the manufacturing, the CIO has to make the best use of the technologies and create organizational wide change that is appreciated by all. Says Azariah: “Any new technology brings in a massive cultural change that has to be managed. When I was working in General Insurance Company (GIC), it was mired in papers, files, and manual typewriters. In a traditional set up such as GIC, when the CIO tries to infuse fresh technology, it brings huge change and the CIO has to successfully engineer that change.” Azariah in the mid 1990s brought Internet, to GIC, and for the first time the employees visiting cards had personal email addresses and website IDs. Beginning from such small initiatives Azariah embarked on an IT drive that saw the development of in-house ERP at GIC. Before he left GIC, he even prescribed SAP rollout. With the concrete IT foundations he had laid-GIC today, is in the process of deploying a best-of-breed ERP solution.

In the Beginning
Azariah claims that he was not an IT man. It so happened that he was involved with IT since the 1970s. His first job was at IBM as an industrial engineer in the early 1970's. After some time he moved on to TCS in the mid 1970's when IBM shut shop and winded operations in India. During the 1970s, TCS was a small entity with just 80 people on board. Later on he moved to L&T and after a stint he joined the Shipping Corporation as assistant manager of systems. Then the break-through came in 1981 when he joined CMC in the marketing department and subsequently, was sent as the lead consultant to RBI for the Rangarajan Committee on Banks. The Rangarajan Committee was the first serious effort made towards computerization of the banks. “Here I met a lot of CEOs from IT companies and learnt a lot,” says Azariah. In CMC he worked on diverse verticals and also played a key role in the Railway Reservation System that was developed in the late 1980s. After 10 years at CMC, he left the organization and joined Origin, a Philips company in 1992. He joined as the CIO for GIC in 1995. “My job at GIC was to completely transform its IT infrastructure. When I left, I had made the company ready for ERP.” At GIC Azariah ushered in various IT initiatives, the development of a homegrown ERP was one among them.

Rendezvous with Reliance
After leaving his mark in GIC, Azariah joined as CIO for the Reliance Group's Polyester Sector in 2001. The Polyester sector was least automated among the Reliance Group of companies. Here his dream of rolling out a full-fledged ERP got started. Azariah rolled out SAP and the processes started during 2001. SAP went live towards the end of 2002. Later, he also played a consultative role in Reliance Infcomm and gave strategic directions for IT initiatives.

Current Role CIO- MRF

Plans to roll out ERP and bring in enterprise wide change  Past Roles After serving in various IT capacities Prince Azariah has worked in companies such as IBM, TCS, Shipping Corporation, GIC, and Reliance. Through all his roles he has acquired a wealth of information on diverse verticals from BFSI to Petroleum. He is credited with turning around the systems set up at GIC and has engineered an enterprise wide transformation at GIC. As CIO of Reliance Polyester Sector, he successfully deployed SAP and ERP.  He has also consulted on various IT projects and helped in deploying core-banking projects. An avid reader, Azariah unwinds by reading on various subjects.

The New Job
In April 2006 he joined as the CIO of MRF Tyres. According to him there is a set of goals he intens to do at MRF. On top of his agenda is an ERP rollout that will integrate the silos of information. It is indeed surprising that the company being a leader has accumulated a high degree of legacy systems. Azariah wants to re-engineer the entire IT architecture at MRF in such a way that banking on IT, the business can significantly thrive. For instance, Azariah cites a simple example at MRF. Right now the sales team gets the orders from the dealers and they need to manually go there and get the orders. This according to Azariah can be automated. Sitting right here in the office, the sales team can monitor the order status with dealers logging into a system and place the orders via the system. This is just one example on how IT can become a critical business enabler.

The Role of the CIO
Much has been talked and written about the role of the CIO. For instance, in the developing phase of IT, the EDP mangers were confined to a room in the basement as they were seen as a typically maintaining the hardware. Basically, the role is one of tweaking and problem solving. But as companies grew, so did their reliance on IT. New applications were needed and the EDP managers became the MIS mangers and subsequently blossomed into CIOs. Says Azariah, “A CIO in order to be successful has to understand the domain and bring in the right kind of solutions to the table. Also he should develop a comfort level with the management and needs to convince the top management that such a solution is needed. For instance, in those days, the MIS managers used to say, “What is the requirement, I will revert in two weeks. The present day CIO says across the table to the management what the company wants. They have indeed come a long way.” Azariah feels that the roles of the CIOs have constantly expanded and he has today, become a chief investment officer because he drives the investment on IT.

Being a CIO of one of the leading tyre company is indeed challenging. Prince Azariah is currently, in the process of doing a due diligence of MRF's existing IT set up. The company over the years, has created islands of excellence, but that has resulted in systems not talking to each other. What Azariah is planning-like an ERP rollout will create a cultural and business change at MRF? These challenges need to be addressed. Once the proposed ERP rollout has been completed, MRF would indeed be a very interesting case in exploring how business has been successfully aligned with IT.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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