Technology modernization, digital-first approach, key for India: Sigma Electric

Sigma Electric, a leading manufacturer of engineering and electrical fittings, is an Oracle customer, and has undergone a complete digital transformation.

With its manufacturing facilities located in Pune and Jaipur, Sigma is a significant contributor to India’s Make in India vision. With its impressive clients list that includes HoneyWell, ABB, Siemens, Whirpool, and Phillips, among others, Sigma holds leadership position in electrical lighting, home appliances, power tools and telecom market sectors.

Rajeev Khade, VP and Global Head-IT, Sigma Electric, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview.

DQ: What are the latest trends in the Indian manufacturing industry?

Rajeev Khade: India’s manufacturing industry has emerged as a fast-growing sector, driven by the Government’s push with initiatives like ‘Make in India’ to make the subcontinent a global manufacturing hub.

As per a study by IBEF, the sector has the potential to reach US$ 1 trillion by 2025. Technology modernization, driven by a digital-first approach, will be a key prerequisite to realize this milestone.

In spite of the unprecedented situation we are in, Indian manufacturing sector is steadily getting back onto the growth track. Organizations are rethinking their approach to designing business continuity plans. Interestingly, organizations are turning to technology consumption via an OPEX model as much as possible.

This is helping them to focus on their core business growth, while pushing for cloud-led innovation to achieve manufacturing excellence and increased operational efficiencies.

DQ: Why is technology core to Sigma Electric’s future growth?

Rajeev Khade: Our technology-first approach to business has started paying off, helping us unlock significant business benefits. We’re focused on driving greater process automation, thereby minimizing human errors, while enhancing agility.

As a result, we are already witnessing faster manufacturing cycles, improved productivity, accuracy and quality.

This, in turn, accelerates our time-to-market, enhancing overall customer experience. Further, with cloud-led innovation, we have been able to enhance our business resilience while enabling future growth.

DQ: How has digital transformation led to overall business performance improvement?

Rajeev Khade: Earlier, we had a traditional on-premises IT set-up, which created more constraints as we grew in size and posed many challenges related to application continuity, availability and scaling.

It was also proving to be high on maintenance in terms of costs and bringing down our overall efficiency. This is why we moved to Oracle’s second-generation cloud infrastructure.

With this move, we have freed our IT staff from getting bogged down with routine IT management. They now have ample time to work on other innovative initiatives that can unlock more value for the business. We’re now able to prioritize and focus better on what’s more core to our business.

DQ: What is Sigma Electric’s digital innovation roadmap?

Rajeev Khade: We are focusing on a number of in-house digital initiatives to usher in manufacturing excellence. We have also implemented specific initiatives to capture machine data to help the operations and maintenance teams analyzeand forecast better to improve availability, overall quality and efficiency.

We have charted a 12-18-month roadmap to activate a few projects around IoT and Industry 4.0. We are looking to collaborate further with Oracle Cloud teams for these. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we now have a strong, high performant cloud foundation to help accelerate these projects.

DQ: Tell us about your strategic cloud partnership with Oracle.

Rajeev Khade: When we decided to move to the cloud, we evaluated a number of cloud providers. We realized that OCI was the most suited option for us. By using OCI, we’ve been able to achieve a much better TCO, and more importantly, fast-track our digital efforts.

The ease of migration from our traditional on-premises set-up to OCI was smoother than we imagined. We’ve already moved three critical applications to OCI.

Broadly speaking, by moving to OCI, we’ve achieved superior cloud economics, advanced security, high performance and high availability. We will clock at least 30% improvement in performance.

Also, we believe the switch to an OPEX IT model via OCI will help us realize upfront cost savings to the tune of 20-30%. Last but not the least, we no longer have to worry about the IT infrastructure, maintenance and upgrades, as Oracle will automatically manage all of that.

The move to OCI has proved to be highly cost effective because of one other reason - Oracle’s universal credits model helps us to consume second generation cloud services while we pay only strictly for what we use.