Probir Mitra, senior GM (IT) of Tata Motors speaks to Biztech 2.0 about the contemporary role of IT in businesses and emerging technologies.

Tata Motors had deployed an ERP system on a single server platform in 2003. What are the key considerations before a CIO for such an implementation?

ERP is not just a piece of software. The software-hardware network component may constitute 30%, whereas 70% is mindset change, business process re-engineering and looking at things in a radically different manner. It’s a business project not an IT project. The process should focus on what is the best thing to do; who should do it is only secondary. IT should have conspicuous visibility and top management support.

For example, it’s very difficult for people down the line to appreciate it. At the transaction processing level, there may be marginal overheads of ERP implementation. The benefits are really at a higher level. If you break that down into smaller size, transactions are faster but there are huge costs in consolidating and bringing everything together.

What are some of the indirect benefits of ERP you have seen over the years?

The biggest indirect benefit is rationalisation of business processes across all the distributed units. Having rationalised, the next step is to re-engineer and make it better and smarter. The objective of the whole process has been to converge on smart IT enabled business process, so that the throughput of that business process is maximised. The process and structure of the organisation since the past 5-6 years has been much more agile.

How have the expectations from a CIO changed, considering that IT has evolved at an incredible pace over the last few years?

There are two reasons why expectations are very high now. The potential of IT is growing at a geometric progression. The entire business process streams don’t just look at IT as something desirable; they look at it as something essential. Therefore, as they get more exposed to potential, they become more demanding.

Secondly, with increase in competition and the demand on business, the way business processes are being handled is changing rapidly. We can no longer set up IT to support a business model and expect it to run for 5 years. Pressure of the changing environment is creating pressure on business people to be much more agile and they can’t do that without IT support. This is not just fixed baseline IT support but that which is dynamic enough to be able to deliver continuous change.

Delivering constantly in the face of high expectations is always challenging. What challenges you the most as a CIO?

The challenge is to work with businesses to prioritise which initiatives and enhancements yield the maximum returns. In Tata Motors every year consistently, 60% of what we do is enhancing the baseline and just 40% is bread butter maintenance.

Technologies have been changing fast and we’re quite cautious with it. We do a fair amount of research in assessing the potential of technology. However, we like to tap technology when they’ve reached a certain level of maturity, especially when we talk of big-ticket items.

RFID is an area where we have big plans and we’re exploring a lot of areas where we can use it. Everyone’s problem with RFID is cost structure, which in certain areas is still big. In terms of better equipping businesses, these are 2 areas in which we face constant challenges.

How could RFID benefit your business processes?

We have undertaken a pilot testing of using RFID technology in the paint shop where the temperature is very high. The paint shop typically has several stages and operations take several hours. You need to have real time information of what’s happening inside and at what point the products are. The trick is to find a chip, which will sustain heat and fumes. We are fairly close to a cost effective solution.