Business Standard
According to V V R Babu, chief information officer of ITC Limited, with new businesses and diversification, ITC’s stock keeping units (SKUs) have increased by over 50 percent in the last few years.
“To keep track of stocks, bring down distribution costs and to ensure prompt stock clearance, we are investing substantially into IT and have lined up a number of new projects to ensure ease in operations,” Babu said.
So far, all ITC products were bar coded at the retail level. But now, ITC will bar code its products at the warehouse itself. This is expected to help ITC keep track of product manufacturing time, thereby enabling implementation of first-manufactured-first-out (FMFO) strategy, which means items manufactured first are shipped out of the factory and the warehouse earlier than products manufactured later. This has been facilitated by the implementation of identification technologies and controlled batch management processes.
The automated IT systems will not only keep track of date-of-manufacturing, but also details like weightage and the factory location that manufactured respective products.
Currently, ITC has over 39 warehouses in India and uses close to 500-800 trucks per day for shipment.
So far, ITC's Rs 100 crore investment announced earlier in infrastructure upgradation has reduced lead time, improved availability and brought down stockouts. The IT network of ITC covers over 550 locations in urban, semi-urban and remote rural locations, enterprise mail messaging for more than 8,000 users, six different ERP systems, linked 25 warehouses and 14 processing plants in a year and is capable of setting up operational IT facilities in a rural hypermart in three days.
Among other projects, ITC will also implement this year usage of ‘push technology’ for its salesforce.
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