Marico’s Plan To Leverage IoT in 2016

The company is using the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) for the IoT related data. The implementation partner will be finalised soon.

The FMCG behemoth is in the process of adopting Internet of Things (IoT) to generate and use quality data at its manufacturing locations. The company is looking forward to speed up this project in the next fiscal. It will be a major shift from strategic decision making to predicting actions at an operational level, says Girish Rao, Head IT and Business Analytics, Marico

From a fiscal year perspective, 2014-15, was the year of analytics for Marico. The year was also about rolling out the enterprise mobility project.

The analytics project started off with the data acquisition and slowly moved on to analyzing and using data for business purpose. This shift will further accelerate in 2015-16. Having said that, the focus will continue to remain on data mining and acquiring more accurate data.

“At the operational level, we require more accurate information. The quality of information we got from the earlier systems was only enough for us to make tactical and strategic decision making but may not be really available from an operational decision making perspective. The frequency at which we were getting the data was also not real time and at a transactional level. IoT makes it possible,” says Girish Rao, Head IT and Business Analytics, Marico.

The FMCG behemoth is in the process of adopting this new age technology to generate and use quality data at its manufacturing locations. “We are looking forward to speed up this project in the next fiscal. It will be a major shift from strategic decision making to predicting actions at an operational level with the help of real time data. I see this culminating into action points in the second half of 2015-16,” It’s just a matter of time. The company is using the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) for the IoT related data. The implementation partner will be finalised soon. One more product will be coupled with MII. It includes some amount of Big data analytics at the local level i.e at the plant level and leveraging the current analytics platform at the central level.

It would look something like this. Typically, looking at IoT from a manufacturing perspective, for e.g. the temperature of a boiler can be captured on a minute to minute basis and in some cases, it could even be second and milliseconds. “The temperature of a boiler is a strong determinant of the quality and the final yield of the output. The sensors fitted on the boiler capture the information. The observations will empower us to arrive at better operational decisions in terms of what should be the ideal boiler temperature for getting the right yield or maximizing the yield; what kind of boiler temperature has resulted in what kind of changes in quality of output,” says Rao.

Currently, the data is captured at the end of the shift, which means that the variations within the shift are not recorded neither noticed. Add to it: the data is captured manually thus it is prone to human error. The shift end production data is captured however the intra shift data remains out of hands.

The next- in-line initiative for the IT team at Marico will be to move from standalone products to platforms. Effectively, moving to cloud based platforms, which will give much broader sense to the solution rather than looking at only products and point solutions. It helps in getting the best of the features and secondly, it also brings in best in class processes. Additionally, the benefit is: It is cost efficient. The costing for Cloud based solution is based on use / no of users / features. “We have already moved our HR portals on the cloud. It takes care of all the models that we have developed, internally over the years. Marico is also looking at travel management to be moved onto a single cloud platform to better manage the entire travel ecosystem, which includes accommodation, local travel etc,” informs Rao.

As the service providers mature their offerings cloud platforms ill be adopted for other processes too. The procurement solutions may also be run from cloud based models. But specific business requirements will be retained internally and keep running on the same niche platforms designed in house.