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Todays Strategy and Execution Challenges for a CIO

M. Damodar
Associate Director - IT& Business Process Excellence-Dr Reddy's Laboratories
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
M. Damodar
Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd. (NYSE: RDY) is an integrated global pharmaceutical company, committed to providing affordable and innovative medicines for healthier lives. Through its three businesses - Pharmaceutical Services and Active Ingredients, Global Generics and Proprietary Products – Dr. Reddy's offers a portfolio of products and services including APIs, custom pharmaceutical services, generics, biosimilars, differentiated formulations and NCEs.

Today's IT scenario is completely different from what it used to be in the year 2002 or 1992. The current expectation from board level to shop floor level is "more for less". IT dept is being pushed hard for Faster, Better, Cheaper, solutions delivery department rather than just support business applications. The current demand from shop floor is to maximize automation and bring clear visibility to top floor. Being this demand coming from available matured technology and the matured generation with technology. Untill recently the CIO’s journey and expectation was to give system generated P & L and may be to large extend system supported business consolidation if the organization operates from multiple geographies. This IT goal is much beyond the accomplishment. The board expectation is to have the entire business visibility and shop floor demand is to increase the productivity with less efforts. This is where the focus of ongoing prioritization, planning, visibility and control of business processes, increasing the speed and flexibility with which organizations can manage their business process activities and decision making is the changing trend and always a moving target for IT.

Let me share my recent experience, where alignment of IT to the business need's situation has come to us when we were informed that business wanted to change the tracks and run the business on TOC (Theory of Constraints) principle. The first thought that came to our mind was, there would not be any IT role with this decision. The entire business is running on ERP platform and the process was aligned to suit every situation. Finally when the business process was changed to align with TOC, the changes in supply chain and manufacturing were dramatic. These changes forced us to create new Service Oriented Architect and forced us to add few more applications to strengthen the new TOC based business process. The main challenges were when all Supply Chain Nodes across all geographies changed from demand management to replenishment mode. The previous method of forecast and S & OP process was redundant. At the same time manufacturing plants also changed the production plans to a pull system from push system.

The main challenging and critical activities were:

• Creating and maintaining new business process
• Capturing inventory of each Supply Chain Node

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