As told by Satyanarayana Kasturi, CIO, Dilip Buildcon Limited In partnership with Manoj Pandey, Kyndryl Customer Partner Executive

Dilip Buildcon is already one of the biggest infrastructure construction companies in India, employing 35,000 people to work on modern road, bridge, and mining projects critical to the country’s economy.

In 2016, Dilip Buildcon's business processes were manual and projects in each office were managed independently. As a result, says CIO Satyanarayana Kasturi, the company could not take advantage of economies of scale when procuring fuel, energy, and other essential resources. This impeded growth by keeping up-front investment costs for each project too high for Dilip Buildcon to justify taking on more projects at the same time.

Satyanarayana knew that, above all, enabling end-to-end visibility of Dilip Buildcon's supplier relationships would reduce overall procurement costs and increase agility in distributing construction materials across projects in the same or adjacent regions. By having a holistic view of the business across regional projects, Dilip Buildcon would gain an advantage in how they negotiated multiple contracts in the same time-frame. As a result, the company could increase the number of projects done in parallel and reduce the time to complete as they expanded the business.

Dilip Buildcon's existing enterprise resources planning (ERP) solution was spread out with its employees across India at more than 65 sites. Each operated its own instance of SAP without awareness of the others. Satyanarayana needed an integrated ERP solution to bridge the geographical distances with one comprehensive source of visibility on all Dilip Buildcon projects.
 

A cloud-based solution was the obvious choice. However,  Satyanarayana’s team had limited experience with cloud platforms. He would need the right partner to help design the solution, and guide and manage its implementation. 

Together, Dilip Buildcon and Kyndryl created and integrated standardized workflows within SAP’s intelligent ERP application suite running on the S/4HANA platform deployed in the cloud.
 

The SAP S/4HANA solution enables Dilip Buildcon staff to consistently manage digital business processes from end-to-end in all of its 65 sites across India. The solution integrates applications for business intelligence, finance and controlling, human resources, and material management.
 

Also, to gain insights into the large quantities of data generated during operations, the team implemented SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite, which provides point in time analytics. level Granular analysis of projects in flight provides the information Satyanarayana needs to help the business manage risk related to inevitable shifts in projects underway.
 

In implementing the solution, Satyanarayana avoided the need for up-front capital investments in IT infrastructure by choosing Kyndryl’s cloud-based and fully managed SAP solution. This also eliminated the need for Satyanarayana to build a large infrastructure team within the company.
 

Because Dilip Buildcon now has an accurate and comprehensive view of assets and inventory, they can forecast requirements for spare parts and raw materials with a higher degree of accuracy. That enables maintaining optimal inventory levels in each part of the organization. Improved forecasting reduces working capital requirements by 5%, which enable the company to take on in additional projects.

As part of the continued partnership, Dilip Buildcon and Kyndryl have weekly reviews of infrastructure operations as related to the current performance of the business, and monthly meetings that identify strategic opportunities for IT improvement that support business goals.
 

In 2023, to reduce infrastructure costs that were set to rise substantially with the existing cloud deployment, but also to gain true cloud agility, scale, and performance, Satyanarayana consulted with Kyndryl on alternatives. He accepted the recommendation to migrate the company's entire SAP landscape from an existing cloud provider to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The migration included upgrading Dilip Buildcon to the latest version of SAP and relocating the physical S4/HANA server into the AWS landing zone.
 

The highest priority was protecting business-as-usual operations during migration. To do that, the team used Kyndryl's automation framework. By making hardware interchangeable, and eliminating the work of building virtual machines manually, this approach ensured reliability in provisioning infrastructure in the new environment, increasing accuracy and reducing the time to provision infrastructure resources.
 

As a result, within the AWS landing zone, Satyanarayana’s team could quickly scale up operations by 800%, if needed. Kyndryl continues to provide the staff needed to manage the SAP Basis going forward, consulting with AWS when needed for advice on best practices in using the platform’s cloud services.

 Business impact

• $7 million (USD) annual savings in decreased operations costs.
• 5% reduction in working capital, increasing liquidity and reducing risk.
• Doubling the number of building projects Dilip Buildcon can run simultaneously (from 20 to 40) as a result of ERP integrations

• With zero impact on operations, the team migrated the SAP Basis for Dev, QA, and Production environments into Amazon Web Services (AWS) in just seven weeks.
• Zero incidents of any severity level in the year since migration. This contrasts with multiple Severity 1 incidents during tenure in the previous datacenter.
   

Innovations underway

• Designing and building a Security Operations Center (SOC) within the AWS landscape.
• Digitizing the processes that will run Dilip Buildcon's mining projects as part of a 25 year contract with the State of India. These include inventory and product management, and heavy machinery fleet management.
• Exploring fleet, procurement, and finance management use cases for AI enablement

Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Bhopal, India, Dilip Buildcon Limited has grown to become the largest builder of roads in the country. With operations in roads and highways, urban development, mining and irrigation, Dilip Buildcon Limited employs more than 35,000 people.