How Cloud Is Helping Accelerate Over 200 Digital Initiatives

Rajeev Khade Shares Sigma Electric's Move to Cloud and Its Digital Strategy
How Cloud Is Helping Accelerate Over 200 Digital Initiatives
Rajeev Khade, VP and global head, IT, Sigma Electric

Rajeev Khade, VP and global head, IT, Sigma Electric, discusses the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and how cloud helped the company be better prepared to tackle them. He further talks about the component manufacturer's digital strategy and how its partnership with Oracle Cloud is helping accelerate the digitalization journey.

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Edited excerpts follow:

In what ways is the COVID-19 pandemic shaping up digital adoption trends in the manufacturing sector?

The manufacturing industry is in the midst of a rebuilding and re-innovating stage, where companies are focusing on making the right technology bets considering the long-term benefits. Leveraging technologies such as cloud, IoT, AI/ML, big data and analytics is proving to be highly beneficial to businesses. They are continuously working toward fine-tuning their business models to make them highly resilient and reduce the impact of such unforeseen disruptions in the future.

Companies have had to scale remote work and accelerate digitalization rapidly. A recent WEF report highlights that in the manufacturing sector, about 89% of the companies have adopted cloud computing in pursuit of digitalization. This pace will only accelerate in the near future, and we will see greater adoption of automated technologies to not only enhance factory operations to ensure increased product capacities and greater quality but also to ensure workers' safety.

How prepared was Sigma Electric to tackle the disruptions caused by the pandemic?

The unprecedented situation posed serious disruptions in not only the supply chain but also the overall workflow of many organizations. Fortunately for us, we had planned our move to cloud earlier, which helped minimize the disruption to business to a great extent. From an employee perspective, enabling them to successfully work remotely wasn't as challenging as we had initially anticipated.

Can you cite an example of how your existing cloud infrastructure provided you with the agility and resilience that's key to staying operational amid the current circumstances?

Our biggest challenge has been time to market, especially during these challenging times. Owing to limited mobility and transport during the nationwide lockdown period, it became more difficult to fulfill customer orders ahead of time or even on time. In our case, most of the customers are U.S. based. So, we need to factor in additional time for logistics and shipping beyond core production. Cloud helped us address this issue and accelerate the pace of our entire supply chain - from planning to order delivery.

Can you give us an overview of your current cloud footprint?

We completed our migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) around June 2020 and have already moved three business-critical applications including ERP to Oracle Cloud, and subsequently plan to move more workloads onto OCI. Our internal stakeholders have consistently witnessed improved availability and performance of business-critical applications since the move to Oracle Cloud. We will be clocking a 30% improvement in performance. Further, by switching to an opex IT model with cloud, we have realized upfront cost savings to the tune of 20% to 30%.

More importantly, our move to cloud has helped expedite our digitalization efforts, which were earlier constrained by the maintenance, scalability and availability limitations of our on-premises IT setup. Currently, we are working on nearly 200 digital initiatives across various departments and functions, and Oracle Cloud has provided us with a strong, high-performance cloud foundation to help accelerate these projects. We no longer have to worry about the infrastructure, maintenance and upgrades, as they are managed by Oracle automatically.

What's your digital strategy both in the near and long term, and which technologies are you betting on in the next year?

We have a holistic approach to digitalization. We don't experiment with emerging technologies if they don't address an immediate or long-term business need. Our focus is on achieving agility and innovation through complete digitalization to bring in increased efficiency across core business functions.

Going forward, leveraging cloud to its full potential is going to be our priority in helping accelerate the pace of our digitalization efforts. In addition, we are focused on specific digital initiatives and innovations that will help us improve manufacturing productivity and operational efficiencies across departments - be it shop floor, finance or HR. These include initiatives around quality improvement and consistency, a new RFQ process, virtual HR outreach through video/audio call features, item registration, etc. At Sigma Electric, we have a clear roadmap for expediting our Industry 4.0 transformation, and these projects will see us taking advantage of machine learning (ML) and IoT in a bigger way in the next 12 to 18 months. For instance, capturing machine data to help the operations and maintenance teams analyze and forecast machine availability and productivity better.

This article was previously published on the DynamicCIO website on Nov. 6, 2020.


About the Author

Shipra Malhotra

Shipra Malhotra

Managing Editor, ISMG

Malhotra has more than two decades of experience in technology journalism and public relations. She writes about enterprise technology and security-related issues and has worked at Biztech2.com, Dataquest and The Indian Express.




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