How technology is enabling the Indian manufacturing sector to fight the COVID19 battle

Enabling Work from Home (WFH)
Piramal Glass was able to respond very quickly to the national lockdown announcement. Many employees already had laptops to connect swiftly to the networks and work from home (WFH). As most of the systems are cloud based, it becomes easy to provide connectivity. In case of employees with desktops, the IT team procured leased laptops that were configured with the required applications and security. “For some of our on-premise systems, like SAP S4/HANA, users have to access it securely over VPN, for which we enabled access for all employees. Thus transition to the WFH scenario was seamless and without any disruption,” states Poorav Sheth, CDO & CIO, Piramal Glass.

For some of the systems such as Business Intelligence dashboards, Smart Manufacturing platform and Supply Chain visibility tools, “we are seeing a 20% uptake in access from smartphones as compared to office desktop access,” Says Sheth.

At Havells India, in the aftermath of COVID-19, the factory staff was also working from home. It’s the right time to impart training over and above what they are trained for when at the shop floor. The necessary IT infrastructure is being provided. “We are also providing IT applications from a work from home scenario (WFH) for the Quality Check teams to conduct training,” says Jayant Kapoor, Head – Manufacturing IT, Havells.

The national lockdown was a big challenge, in terms of enabling the WFH scenario for over two thousand employees at Aurobindo Pharma, which, unlike the services or IT sector, is not used to WFH. Even for the employees who have access to WFH have rarely used it. To procure laptops for so many employees in a short period was a challenge. “We brainstormed internally to enable a quick secure solution in the shortest period which gives the flexibility and ease of work to employees while WFH. So, the requisite infrastructure was built to enable bring your own device (BYOD), wherein the employees can remotely access the office desktop,” says Gyan Pandey, Global and Group CIO, Aurobindo Pharma. Once they are connected to the office desktop, internet browsing , clipboard services etc cannot be done on their end device, and all activities will be performed as if they are working on their office desktop.

Keeping the plants humming
As a part of the Business Continuity Plan at Piramal Glass, business continuity leads have been appointed across each function and location. They are a single point of contact for co-ordinating and making sure the technology and operations are running smoothly. Additionally, each business function conducts a daily standup meeting, a practise borrowed from agile methodology, which is a typical culture in technology teams.

All these systems and best practices are being leveraged across Piramal Glass’ global locations in India, US & Sri Lanka.

The shop floor at the manufacturing plants has skeleton staff manning the manufacturing operations. Piramal Glass has customers in the pharma and food industry, which comes under the essential services category. The senior shop floor personnel that are working from home can monitor the production and quality process via the smart manufacturing solution, the Real Time Manufacturing Insights (RTMI) system hosted on cloud and they can instruct the employees on the shop floor as required.

In manufacturing, it’s imperative for the HR to monitor the attendance and ensure employee productivity. “We enabled the attendance monitoring at two levels. The IT ensured tracking and registering of the employees, who are logged-in and the duration; the total upload and download on the device. At the second level, the HoD had a work from home productivity tracker sheet. When the lockdown was announced, IT was given an estimate to allocate for over 500 people to WFH, which was later scaled to 1700 employees! There are about 500 employees working on company provided laptops and the rest are on BYOD,” informs Pandey.

Aurobindo Pharma is on a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. Thus the employees are given access to the office desktop on their device, which automatically doesnt allow them to access their personal device.

Planning for the future
Piramal Glass is running trials for a solution to monitor the health of the employees and workers when they resume after the lockdown is over. The AI-based solution entails a thermal camera to check the temperature of the employee to give an indication whether there are initial symptoms to suggest whether he is infected. It will also have a facial recognition feature that will double up as an attendance marking. “We see this as an opportunity to invest more in Digital & cloud-based solutions to be able to work seamlessly with virtual teams,” says Sheth.

Secondly, with the lockdown restricting employees to their homes, it has given the leeway to put specific IT projects on a fast track. Usually, in a business-as-usual scenario, getting time from certain business users to contribute to IT projects is a challenge. Now, when they are at home, it’s easy to get them to dedicate time for the IT projects. For e.g. For making configuration changes in SAP, understanding the master data or to understand the processes, the participation from the business users is critical to correctly map the changes in the system. “We are collaborating with them on VC sessions and getting their undivided attention,” says Kapoor.

Havells is currently in the process of implementing the manufacturing execution system (MES). It is very master data and process intensive and getting the business users to come together and map the system is being done online. The IT team is even testing the system and certain prototypes from a WFH scenario over the VPN.

A manufacturing planning solution is also under implementation. It requires multiple runs to be conducted before it is perfected upon. It’s a highly iterative process. This is a highly challenging task when the plant is operational. To bring the users at one place and discuss, implement and then iterate again.

To be updated…