When Chitale Dairy started its IT journey back in the 80s, little did it know about technology’s potential to change dairy production and its impact in rural India. Today, as the organization completes 74 years of existence, using technology for a positive impact has become its operational mantra.
From this belief has stemmed an array of technology driven initiatives. “We have always used technology to stay ahead of the curve. We started on our tech journey several years back with an ERP for billing. The idea was to do more with less. Also, we have always tried to use best of breed technology. We believe that survival is difficult for organizations who do not innovate with new technology and business ideas,” details Chitale.
It was about five years back that the organization realized that they cannot go on increasing their hardware sprawl. As a result, they decided to virtualize. According to Chitale, they were the first in their industry to virutalize. “Since we already had Dell boxes, it made sense for us to go with them. Also, Dell had a modular approach, they have servers that can be populated as per our will and don’t need continuous investment. We started with scalable architecture and that’s where Dell pitched in.”
Today, the dairy has about 40-50 servers, and everything from processes to enterprise applications, is virtualized. The company is also running its own private cloud in its in-house data center.
Do-IT-yourself
As the private cloud and own data center indicate, Chitale Dairy has been following the in-house IT approach. Part of the reason for this is that when they started their IT journey, there were hardly any options available the market.
“We have been developing our apps since 80’s because back then, there were hardly any apps available, more so, for our vertical. We used to do programming using Qbasic, which is all but redundant now,” recalls Chitale.
As of now, Chitale Dairy has an IT team of five people. They have the complete Lamp stack running at the back-end and it’s all open source. Lamp is short form for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhP. The Lamp stack refers to a combination of these four open source software that are used to build web servers for hosting websites or data. Also, all their apps are Web 2.0 compliant and written in PHP. Since it’s all open source, the cost of ownership is very less in terms of software applications, says Chitale.
There are some innovative, in-house solutions that the organization is running. Take for instance their logistics management system. Explains Chitale, “We do about 10-20,000 km everyday. Because logistics play a very important role in ensuring distribution, we decided to implement a logistics management system. All our vehicles are tracked in real time. We also keep our distributors updated on the location of their goods.”
Chitale Dairy also tries to replicate their technologies for their call centers, that they have opened up to assist the farmer community. The whole idea was to share information in the local language. They are using SMS heavily to convey information to farmers in the form of to-do lists.
As far as hardware goes, Chitale believes that investing in best of breed, scalable hardware is any organization’s best bet. He says that with Dell’s storage solutions, his manageability woes have gone down drastically. “With Dell’s Fluid architechture, we don’t feel the need to physically go down and see the storage boxes. We get a mail every month with all that we need to know. We are choosy about our hardware performance and realize that too much tech can be a problem sometimes.”
Animal lifecycle management
Although there are many technology innovations that Chitale Dairy has done, one that particularly stands out is their animal lifecycle management project, or as Chitale describes it, their “Cows to Cloud” initiative.
Though not many would have heard of a process like this, for Chitale Dairy, it’s an everyday affair. Under this project, the dairy has tagged about 10,000 cows with RFID tags and is using the data generated for better mating and lifecycle management of the animals.
“We have been able to improve genetics and do selective breeding with the help of data mining. One million calves have been born using this technology,” beams Chitale. They also got a US $50,000 grant from World Bank for this project. “In the west, each animal has an ID. We are trying to create a similar model for India,” he says.
Per animal productivity is very low in India, when compared to the West, despite having the same amount of feed. It is very important to have better genetics for improving productivity. “So, we started working towards improving this generation by generation. We started running a program called genetic mating system (GMS), which is all hosted on our cloud. We try to rate cows according to several parameters and give them the best match that negates some of their issues. All this is coming from the data and data analytics,” elaborates Chitale.
The project has seen some heartening results too. “The national yield average of Indian buffaloes is about 800 liters (from one lactation cycle to the next). We maintain a minimum average of 2500 liters for our buffaloes. All these animals are fed, bred and monitored by computers,” declares Chitale.
The dairy started their pilot with PDA devices but animals ended up destroying those PDAs. So they decided mobiles are the best end point solutions. As a result, all information regarding animals ranging from their diet to the seasonal care that they need, are now delivered to farmers via messages. Chitale has also tried to make this project self sustaining. “We try to sell this information to pharma companies, drug manufacturers, to insurance companies. So its a self sustaining model,” he says. As of now, Chitale Dairy has 10,000 animals and five people manning them, under this project. They plan to increase this number to 50,000 animals in the near future.
According to Chitale, the government, both at the central and state level, is considering their initiative very seriously and trying to create a sort of data network of animals.
Future-ready
Chitale Dairy has a slew of IT projects that are ongoing. Take for instance their initiative for their retail outlets which they have recently deployed. All their retail shops in Pune had been automated with RFIDs long ago. Now, the dairy has introduced limited credit card kind of concept in these shops wherein, when customers enter the shop they get a smart card. Any transactions they do are processed via the card and at the exit, they just surrender the card and get the bills. They don’t have to pay at every counter. “One has to treat IT as a business enabler and not a cost center. Only then will the justification of RoI come,” emphasizes Chitale.
As a further evolution, Chitale aims to do business process automation and try to bride the gaps between factory world and financial world by creating an ecosystem for unified flow of information. “We are trying to build intelligence tools which shall enable us to give information back to the production people. We want to de-centralize information. Yes, creating dashboards for so many employees is a task but we are trying to make it simple and standardized,” he reveals.
Chitale believes that one area he has had it easy is the fact that he is himself managing the IT function of his organization. Otherwise, he admits, funds can be a challenge for IT heads. The big challenge that he has faced at several junctures is trying to strike the right balance between hardware and software. “If we invest too much in the software, we were left with very less for the hardware. So we’re always at a crossroads there. We decided to invest in good robust hardware where we could achieve cost realization in terms of applications. And we focused on open source to build efficient and scalable apps,” he sums up his mantra.