Larsen & Toubro (L&T), being the leading engineering service manufacturing and service provider in India started its journey using cloud-based technologies like geospatial, LiDAR, AI, ML, and various other tools and applications and platforms to get accurate data and data on which it can be objective about decision making, and use the data to benchmark the company’s position in the current scenarios.
The company has one of the largest heavy engineering workshops on the Earth in Hazira, Gujarat, where it makes ‘made to client specifications kind of order’. “The online delivery in Hazira now is 99-98, once upon a time it used to be 120-130. That means it was taking 20% more time. Today, 2% to 3% ahead of time, which is a big thing for some of these massive fabrications that L&T is doing,” informed S.N Subrahmanyam, Chief Executive officer & Managing Director Larsen & Toubro in a fireside chat session with Anant Maheswari, President Microsoft India.
Not only this, the company has introduced various forms of CNC machines, introduced various forms of digitally-controlled machines, boring machines, machining parts, and so on forth. There are more than one hundred machines in Hazira which are all IIoTs. So, all-round capability enhancement has been there. Similarly, on the project side, more than 13,000 equipment’s has been connected today.
Post-adoption of WFH across the companies of L&T on the services side, namely, LTI, Mindtree and LTTS, there has been an increase in productivity, client satisfaction at all-time high, employee perception within the organization increased enormously and employees have been available for longer hours. However, whether it is the way to go forward is yet to be decided considering the project manufacturing companies cannot adopt it full-time owing to certain specific applications.
On sustainability and skilling, Subrahmanyam said, “We have a clear roadmap till 2040 – complex wise, campus wise, people wise – by which we aim to be a carbon neutral and zero water discharge company. As an organization, we understand that sustainability has become a complex topic across the globe due to climate change and we are somewhat a part of it. Again, we have approached it in two parts – what we can do as an organization in business and what we can do with regards to our consumption as an organization. From a business point of view, we have considered green hydrogen as a serious business. We plan to make investments in green hydrogen plants as well as EPC going forward.”
The company has introduced multiple digital tools that are exercised more by the young people who are joining the organization. The company believes it has been equally important to re-skill the older employees in today’s scenario of the internet and WFH.