Private Cloud Saves Rs 64.1crore per annum for Vedanta

Vedanta required a swift and hassle-free provision of IT services in the organization. Along with this, the company was looking at high availability of IT resources and services, better control and monitoring of infrastructure cost and scalability and resiliency to business requirements.

Thus, the company deployed Vedanta Private Cloud Computing Environment (VPCCE). This environment has enabled the company to host applications, infrastructure and services over the private cloud, which caters to around five subsidiaries (Sterlite Energy, Talwandi Saboo Power, Vedanta Alumina, Allied Port Services and Vedanta Aluminum), corporate and regional offices, depots and manufacturing plants across the country.

Vedanta is also providing private cloud services to third-party companies like Sterlite Technologies, Evonic Energy, KPS, Siemens and L&T, to name a few, which leverage Vedanta’s communication/ infrastructure services over the private cloud for their operations. Keeping in line with the reduction in company wise IT budget, Vedanta came up with an innovative idea of opting for private cloud to support the five companies and more than seven third-party organizations, currently providing enough IT budget and resources to deliver growth-oriented IT projects and rationalize IT project cost across the sector.

The total investment on VPCCE was Rs 9.88 crore and total savings and cost optimizations achieved across locations through this project is Rs 64.1 crore per annum. Along with cost savings, the project had improved the customer services by more than 25 percent by providing production order fulfillment accuracy, speed of response and accurate status information through improved processes due to MES.

Before the VPCCE implementation, the companies were siloed and each legal entity had separate department such as time-office, telecommunication, plant communication, plant automation and IT, which incurred multiple budgetary/ resource pool. The result was only implementation achievements and that too after losing a certain amount of time for doing the same.

With VPCCE in place, the scenario has changed to a centralized location for implementations with an easy manageability and cost benefits. Cost optimization has happened to a great extent in terms of SaaS/PaaS/ IaaS, apart from the elimination of effort duplication. Now the sector is controlled from a single location, with only cost being the additional licenses for increasing the end-user. For the aluminium sector, the IT department takes care of all the activities performed by time-office, telecommunication, plant communication, plant automation and IT centrally for all five companies.

VPCCE has also been able to deploy application/systems in quick time. For example, the company was able to deploy Gate Security system for Vedanta Alumina in three days time, completed template based SAP implementation for Talwandi Saboo Power in 10 days, without spending additional resource.

Leveraging the benefits of the cloud environment, VPCCE was able to achieve the SAP, Gate Entry, Communications, e-recruitment and desktop video conferencing deployment in the last six months in the aluminium sector, which included two new business line items, three port projects and one power plant in line with the business plan, with no extra CAPEX spent for individual locations.