| |DECEMBER 20219OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE Recently at Nalagarh we have gone live with one of the biggest DX initiatives in recent times i.e. ePAD. ePAD is the abbreviation of our Shop Floor automation project i.e. e­Process Automation and Digitization. We believe this will be a game changer in EPL's automation history and a big step towards Industry 4.0 along with complete digitalization of the shop-floor processes. This initiative is unique in nature as it seamlessly integrates many technologies like Edge Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) Gateways, Mobile Computing, Mobile Device Management, IoT and ERP on a single platform. All these technologies have been seamlessly integrated to deliver wow experience to our shop floor users and deliver MES++ kind of functionalities. Taking DX further we have completely digitized Plant Maintenance Process and as a Pilot in of our US plant, we are automating our supply Chain processes by implementing Automatic Guided Vehicles.ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS: In today's uncertain and challenging business environment, digitized processes and procedures have started playing a pivotal role. We digitized our complete procure to pay process almost a couple of years back. That really helped us seamlessly navigate the pandemic year as it did not impact our vendor payments.In our journey towards building a performance oriented organisation, the entire performance, planning and budgeting process underwent a radical change. The Finance & Accounts team has done away with the cumbersome process of collecting data in worksheets and consolidating them to prepare Budgets. With the advent of tools the entire planning and budgeting has been digitized. It has eased the process of budgeting by not only improving the accuracy of data but also in improving the efficiency of our people.We are kick starting the process of migrating out from traditional ERP to in memory computing database architecture which I am sure would simplify many of business processes and lay the foundation for initiating DX in future. Organizations are having a large amount of data like Customer details, Sales Orders, Production Orders, Shipment documents, Inventory, Lorry Receipts, A/Cs receivable and A/Cs payable. How to convert this sea of data into information is a challenge. With the help of good analytics applications this data can be converted into meaningful Reports, Dashboards, Data sheets and EWS (Early Warning Signals) to ensure that all processes are running to the best of its ability. To enable slice and dice and quick dissemination of information we have developed dashboards using various open source tools and ERP data. Currently dashboards are displaying data pertaining to manufacturing and sales KPIs (key performance indicators) and the same is deployed on the shop floor users and regional leadership team. In future we will include other KPIs like inventory and safety incidents. In the future once our ERP is migrated to a new platform we will start migration to cloud data lakes.I guess any CIO's article on DX is not complete without mentioning the cloud journey of organisation. At EPL, we are leveraging Public, Private and Hybrid cloud extensively depending on criticality of applications. This also helps us to meet strict data compliance laid by various bodies like the EU's GDPR and others. For e.g. our complete HCM data is on SaaS based application hosted out of Europe. Similarly for most of other business application including ERP & email, we have gone with single instance architype hosted out of 3rd party data centreNo amount DX can guarantee success unless and until you have buy-ins at all the levels. Whether it is CXO's approving your capex, business processes owners defining what they want or ultimately the end users who are going to use your system it's very important they are involved at each and every stage of the project. I know for many of colleagues and peers in the industry this would sound very basic, but then that's where we falter and many good initiatives die natural death for want of user buy in. As 2021 unfolds into another difficult year due to the ongoing second wave of Covid Pandemic, we have to continue our quest to provide business with more and more armours to win over VUCA times and achieve our goals. It will be apt to quote John F Kennedy who said that "Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." A study done by MIT predicts that 40 PERCENT of the businesses that don't adopt new technologies will get wiped out in the next 10 years
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