Beena Nayar, Head-IT, Forbes Marshall, explains how a digital-first approach to business is helping fast-track innovation, and how using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has helped Forbes Marshall achieve superior price-performance benefits
Please talk about the latest trends in the heavy engineering industry.
Industry 4.0 has helped transform the manufacturing industry by allowing organizations to deploy new tools and technology throughout the product lifecycle -from helping firms improve operational visibility, to reducing costs, from shortening manufacturing times to helping deliver a consistently great experience to customers.
I believe it’s an opportune time to further push the envelope and find more synergy for seamless human-machine collaboration. Digital technologies are making it possible to rethink manufacturing strategies. Manufacturers are increasingly realizing the need to develop a more holistic, progressive product-as-a-service delivery mindset in the new decade. Adoption of AI/ML, RPA, etc is on the rise. There is growing interest in experimenting with ‘digital twins’ in the design and maintenance space. Last but not the least, there is a concerted effort from across the board throughout our industry to embrace more sustainable manufacturing practices that help make the world a better place and minimize environmental disruption.
- What do you think about digitalization in this industry?
The pandemic compelled many sectors, including manufacturing, to rethink ways in which we can improve business resilience, with a strong digital foundation. I think many manufacturers have already put their digital journeys into top gear, to accelerate growth recovery and sustain business success. Using digital intelligence and connected technologies to transform traditional production plants into smart factories is resulting in improved productivity, profitability, greater compliance, and more importantly, increased customer satisfaction. 2021 will be the year when we’ll see many more manufacturers make the digital leap more proactively.
- How has technology played a role in Forbes Marshall’s growth?
Forbes Marshall is a leading manufacturer of steam engineering and control instrumentation solutions. We manufacture products and services that help industries save energy, improve process quality and throughput, and run a clean and safe factory. Our purpose is ‘Energizing Businesses and Communities worldwide’. Our aspiration is to be a leader in energy and process automation solutions. For us to realize this, technology will be the key.
We use a variety of digital tools and platforms. These include a mix of what we have built in-house and some that are offered by third-party tech providers like Oracle. Broadly, our IT landscape consists of Oracle EBS (ERP) and Oracle ASCP, plus custom applications for enabling digitization and advanced automation. All these are designed and managed to increase employee productivity and improve process efficiencies to better support the business. For instance, our mobility solutions automate transactions and also enable traceability of material movement throughout the supply chain, helping in improved visibility and minimizing wastage.
Using BI solutions for data analytics, we have been able to facilitate faster and better business decisions, which have helped identify and resolve supply chain bottlenecks, improve planning and increase sales, for example.
- What is the significance of your partnership with Oracle? How is the partnership helping your business?
Oracle has been one of our strategic technology partners for a number of years. We are now running Oracle applications on the second generation Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) instead of on-premises. This will help us focus more on our core business, with Oracle automatically managing future upgrades and supporting us dynamically with capability enhancements.
Using OCI, we have been able to fast-track our reporting and analytics/insights cycle, especially for long-running and time-consuming reports/procedures. We have seen an average 30 percent improvement in application performance. Further, for IT, the time required for cloning instances and the time taken for backup have been reduced by 50 percent, empowering the IT team to focus better on higher value creation for the business.
- Please share your organization’stechnology and digital innovation roadmap.
We are currently using RPA to automate some mundane transactions, and we intend to continue on this path in conjunction with OCR and AI/ML to automate and enable faster, better decision-making. In addition, we are working on AR/VR projects to help our customers and field engineers an intuitive, immersive transaction experience.
To further strengthen our organization’s business resilience and digital agility, we are looking at a cloud-first approach for any new tech initiatives. Some of these include deploying an advanced warehouse management system, rolling out more mobility and Industry 4.0 initiatives, amongst others.
Website – https://www.forbesmarshall.com/India
Website – https://www.oracle.com/in
