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When Tata Steel launched the TV commercial, 'We also make steel' in the 1990s, it struck an emotional chord with people and made them see how socially committed the company is. Incepted in 1907, Tata Steel is Asia's first and India's biggest integrated private sector steel company. With a slew of iron ore and coalmines, and state of the art steel manufacturing facilities in Jamshedpur, the company is one of its kind. The manufacturing infrastructure cuts across cold rolling mill complexes to finishing facilities.

Varun Jha

Tata Steel's Jamshedpur plant has a capacity of 4 mn tons per year, and produces flat as well as long products. Currently, to meet growing demands, the plant is being expanded to accommodate another million. Tata Steel has set up an ambitious target of 15 mn ton capacity per year by 2010. As part of its expansion plans the company recently made investments in NatSteel Singapore, which will expand its footprint in six countries in the Asia Pacific region and China.

Tata Steel's products include hot and cold rolled coils and sheets, galvanized sheets, tubes, wire rods, construction re-bars, rings and bearings. The company has introduced brands like Tata Steelium (the world's first branded Cold Rolled Steel), Tata Shaktee (Galvanized Corrugated Sheets), Tata Tiscon (re-bars), Tata Pipes, Tata Bearings, Tata Agrico (hand tools and implements) and Tata Wiron (galvanized wire products). The Construction Solution Group explores new avenues for steel utilization by techniques that are economical. Tata Steel has also developed 'galvannealed' cold rolled steel with technical assistance from Nippon steel for high-end auto applications.

The IT setup
An industry veteran, Varun Jha has seen IT from its formative years, and being a domain man he knows his vertical in and out. Jha took over the MIS at Tata Steel way back in 1994 and, over the years, has put in place key IT implementations. "IT investments need a full business justification. This justification can be based on RoI, which is quite suitable for transactional IT systems. In some other cases IT investments are an essential enabler for business initiatives. In such cases the justification or RoI should be for the entire investment on that initiative and not separately for enabling IT systems. Tata Steel follows a portfolio approach to IT where IT investments are evaluated as per Gartner's guidelines applicable to the portfolio category to which the investment belongs," says Jha.

Running a huge enterprise like Tata Steel is a task that calls for a high degree of planning and execution. Here is where Jha's domain intensive knowledge helped to conceive and implement various solutions. Unlike other areas, Steel as a vertical is an extremely complicated terrain. The finished product happens after various processes-from iron ore to selling to OEMs to mainstream consumers. The key differentiator of the steel vertical is that it has two parts to the supply chain. The first part is the converging supply chain that in its ambit includes raw materials that are converted into crude iron. The second part is the diverging supply chain. This unique combination of converging and diverging supply chains is unique to the metal industry. Says Jha, "In all these IT is used at varying levels and stages."

The company last year embarked on some major initiatives-most significant being the expansion of SAP to business units that were not covered before. The company's major business applications run on SAP, which it started rolling out in 1999 in a phased manner. Says Jha, "Unlike other enterprises, we did not do a big bang ERP roll out. We started in a phased manner in 1999, and the first process we did was the order generation and fulfillment part. Subsequently, we went ahead with the procurement process and the associated accounting functionalities. The production planning systems for the steel plant was custom built using the APO module of SAP."

Major IT initiatives and implementations at Tata Steel SAP R/3 in Sales, Procurement, Finance and Accounting, Production Planning Systems for Steel plants using the APO module of SAP Baan at Tisco growth shop and in spares manufacturing unit Workflow, Document Management, Collaboration using Lotus Notes Data Warehousing and Data Mining for manufacturing processes E-procurement, e-auction, and other e-enablement initiatives Knowledge Management and Intranet Videoconferencing, live video streaming for improved communication across geographies VoIP, Wi-Fi, integration with cell phones and PDAs to support mobile computing

In the area of quality, Jha led the implementation of ISO 9001 for the ITS division of Tata Steel. He also led the effort to get the IT systems of Tata Steel certified under BS-7799 and BS-15000, as he has been involved with the TQM efforts of Tata Steel especially in the area of Information Management. He is also a qualified assessor for assessment under the Tata Business Excellence Model (patterned after the Malcolm Baldridge Model) within the Tata Group.

Going forward Jha says: "We are right now concentrating on improving our data centers and the DR facilities. Business intelligence is also in our radar. Security is also very important to us, as it is paramount in protecting the enterprise's digital assets. We are putting in place a set of processes and sensitizing people on security issues." With his plate full of activities, Varun Jha can be termed as one of the very agile CIOs. He had put in place a pro-active IT architecture that scales up as per the company's expansion and growth. Under his leadership Tata Steel has ushered in an enterprise wide change on a grand scale.

Shrikanth G in Chennai

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