CIOIN

Satish Pendse

CIO, Hindustan Construction

Executive summary

The Nimoo-Bazgo region in Jammu & Kashmir, combines the climatic conditions of the Arctic and a desert. The mountainous terrain off a tributary of the Indus is abuzz with about 3,000 men hard at work building a 45-megawatt hydroelectric power plant. This is one of six mammoth infrastructure projects that HCC has taken up in the state and carried out an ERP implementation.

It was mid-September and sixty days was all he had before a team of 150 engineers and 2,500 construction workers would arrive at the project site - as would winter. The IT team had hardly begun work on the arduous implementation when Satish Pendse, CIO, Hindustan Construction was told that heavy snowfall had been predicted for the 60^th day, threatening his schedule. That is when Pendse and his team put themselves on a new schedule, advancing their deadline by a full week.

Pendse and his team not only stationed themselves at the high-altitude desert but also worked at a furious pace. The last phase of the ERP implementation involved the deployment of VSAT (very small aperture terminal) before the roads would have to be closed for the winter. As it turned out, three of the potential four VSAT connections were possible. The fourth couldn't be deployed at the site before the snowfall began, but Pendse and his team had managed an incredible feat: they had gone live with the ERP in an incredible 45 days.

In order to address the requirements and mitigate the challenges unique to the projects on the IT platform, Pendse ensures that modularity - or the ability to plug-and-play - is core to Project Sankalp. Building modularity in the ERP was done  right from the beginning. Enormous planning went in during the first implementation phase itself, and the entire architecture of the SAP was created accordingly. "Fortunately, we have been in this business for 80 years. We have a Project Management legacy of hundreds of projects and we have domain experts available with us who have worked on those projects," Pendse points out. "We gathered this domain knowledge in the blueprint stage of SAP," he explains. The blueprint helped HCC identify benchmarked solutions. The industry solution available to the enterprise was called Engineering Construction Operations (ECO), which gave HCC industry templates.

Building on the templates, Pendse's team and IBM jointly customized the software platform to HCC's requirements. "We were sure that we didn't want to do too much development. Once you do too much development, maintaining the system becomes an issue. We decided to keep the platform as modular as possible, and introduce tweaks and workarounds wherever required," he says. After the successful ERP implementation across its locations and the stabilization period allowed by management, the goal is to derive value. There are certain straightforward benefits offered by an ERP application: visibility, transparency, stability and real-time connectivity.

"We feel that we can get significant value by impacting several areas, such as inventory, equipment and productivity," says Pendse. "For instance, equipment is a high-cost area. In our company, equipment base assets are worth Rs 1,000 crore. We need to stringently look at productivity and utilization of equipment," he adds. (See Tracking the Building Blocks) Similarly, Pendse plans to use customized pieces of  the application to impact HCC's equipment utilization and productivity. "This is where we will get a much larger impact and value. We have just begun to use it in equipment area, and the results are startling," he explains.