What is it that made a small farm, which started with 300 animals in the 1930s, grow into one of the best known names in the dairy sector today? Chitale Dairy’s CEO, Vishvas Chitale, offers us some insights on how the dairy scaled up over the years.
 |
| The idea is to use the best of what is available (in IT) at the time and move on. Always innovate. Reduce costs. Reduce manpower. Reduce problems. And move to the next and newer system - Vishvas Chitale
CEO, Chitale Dairy |
Chitale Dairy was started in Bhilwadi, Pune with the belief of converting dairy farming into an industry. In the early 1930s and 1940s, milk was produced in small farms and consumed by the families themselves. The founder of the company, Bhaskar Ganesh Chitale, started with dairy farming and supplying butter and dairy products, moving on to processing milk and, finally, selling it as a commodity. “Selling milk as a commodity was started by him. He always had an innovative way of thinking and, today, we as an organisation rely totally on innovation to work up the ladder. We were the first ones to pasteurise milk and distribute it. We were also the first ones to sell milk in plastic pouches in the 1970s,” says Vishvas Chitale.
Challenges
Chitale explains that with the rapid pace of urbanisation and people requiring dairy products more and more in their daily diet, it became extremely important for them to meet this tremendous demand. Scalability was the biggest challenge they faced. Among the other things that required constant upgrading were producing more farm animals and enhancing their genetics to obtain quality output. It all came down to looking out for per animal or per farm activity and ensuring that the required amount of output was received from them.
Solution
“What we are doing is using IT as a tool to leverage per animal productivity. The farmers produce more milk and, thus, we are able to sell that much more in terms of quantity,” says Chitale. “We started with generic based computers and all the data from the business processes, right from procurement, farmer-supplier milk collection centres where the milk is weighed, farmers’ data records up to when the whole milk gets pooled together – goes into the system and the analysis of that particular raw material or milk is transferred to our databases. So, everything from procurement to dispatch of finished products is done by computer processes. Earlier, when it was all on paper, you could not scale it. The new business process helped us scale up.”
Implementation
Chitale Dairy has 10,000 farmers supplying it milk every day, morning and evening. Recognising the benefits of adopting technology from an early stage, the dairy started with incorporating CP/M operating systems and MS-DOS when it was just coming up. It used these systems for a simple purpose – billing the farmers. The dairy depended on IT for maintaining an accounting system, which included details on receiving milk from the farmers, calculation of fat content, multiplying rates, and advances given. It was important for them because the dairy business is a 365 day proposition.
“They supply us their products, so we need to bill them. They cannot bill us because they do not have the infrastructure, we need to receive it and give payment to them – so that’s where we started using IT. That was the first use of computers,” explains Chitale.
Chitale Dairy started moving aggressively thereon. As the growth of IT and computation took place, it kept changing its business models to adapt to more modern software and applications. From MS-DOS to Windows 2000, it kept scaling up because it was imperative to keep pace with technological advances for its own rapid growth.
Today, the need for virtualisation has been recognised as being of paramount importance to the dairy. It had a number of servers with similar systems running on them, so it sought server consolidation. Instead of using five-ten servers, it began using one server and installed virtualisation software on it. So, for all the servers running in the factories, it took their images and all the images were transferred to VMware servers. As a result, all the business processes – collecting the data, processing it for billing for the farmers, making payments, HR information, CRM, controlling the factory environment – were consolidated with the use of the VMware server, thereby automating the entire process.
In order to hold on to its farmer and supplier base, Chitale Dairy has centres where the farmers can get their animals tagged and avail of services such as artificial insemination, milk recording and insurance for the animals. “We provide them with the best possible package so that they do not go to somebody else,” explains Chitale. “We have tagged 10,000 animals and we hope to scale up to a minimum of 50,000 animals of these farmers. We handle around 500,000 litres of milk every day. So, our whole idea is take the cows to the cloud. We want to take all this data to the cloud so that they can get the benefit of clouding and that’s how we hope to make IT enabled farmers.”
Chitale says these ideas came to him when he was introduced to OSS by a few people from Germany and they inspired him to think how technology could provide an impetus to his business and also make it more affordable.
Benefits
Instead of ten physical servers, Chitale Dairy now has one VMware server. This is beneficial in many ways. Power consumption has reduced and reliability has gone up because, now, they use a fewer number of hard disk drives. They could make crores of these servers or, in other words, copies of these servers. Reliability has also gone up because had there been only one server and it had gone down, everything would have had to be recreated – probably taking one or two days. This kind of industry, which functions on a 24/7 cycle, cannot afford that kind of turn-time.
So, in the event of problems, VMware helps them to just roll back and retrieve the system information. This takes care of back-up management. For Chitale Dairy, constant availability 24/7/365 is very crucial for running the business.
“As the IT industry has grown, and newer and newer solutions have become available, we have just been using the best of the systems and applications available at that time. The idea is to use the best of what is available at the time and move on. Always innovate. Reduce costs. Reduce manpower. Reduce problems. And move to the next and newer system,”
says Chitale.
He adds that IT has always been treated as a white elephant. He emphasises identifying and implementing products that give good value for money. “To take away the costs, we use the best of the hardware available, like the Dell M1000E chassis. We went for value for money hardware, and instead of servers, we used VMware to reduce costs. If you make IT more cost effective, it becomes more productive. In the long term, IT is encompassing all business processes,” he says.
Chitale Dairy has emerged as a quality conscious organisation in adhering to newer technology to provide quality products to its customers. Everything from collecting, processing, packaging and distribution is being done through IT. This has helped in timely delivery of services. Any delay in the process could turn the milk sour, rendering an entire day’s work useless.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
