This slide documents our understanding of the IS infrastructure of a typical Indian mid-sized manufacturing organisation, and the resource constraints present there.

One HO, multiple factories, sales offices: A typical mid-sized manufacturing organisation will have a profile roughly matching this description. They have warehouses and sales offices in various locations, many of them with less than six desktop computers and practically zero IT support resources.

Growth related challenges: Most of these manufacturing companies are showing good growth figures in the last five years. This is in part due to the growth of the Indian economy, partly due to overseas business opportunities which were not as easily accessible in the past.

Increasing dependence on IT: Growth brings challenges. Many mid-sized manufacturing companies are owner-managed, with a weak second-layer management cadre. Therefore, the magnitude of business transactions and processes that such a company can handle is dependent on the management bandwidth of the very small top management team.

In this scenario, these manufacturing companies rapidly realise that they cannot even get monthly P&L Statements from all their divisions and factories on time at the beginning of the next month. Their basic inter-divisional accounts reconciliation is rapidly becoming unmanageable. Other business processes are even more severely affected, usually not being processed on a regular basis at all as the company grows. Thus, these companies are turning to core business applications like ERP systems to help them manage their businesses.

IT scenario: Their IT setup is not in a well-managed or healthy state. These companies have traditionally treated their computers as part of the office infrastructure, the way most companies treat their EPABX systems and air conditioning. These companies have rarely invested in senior and experienced IS management resources, and are unable to scale up their IS infrastructure in any planned way. The only IS processes they are able to manage well are the purchase and repair of desktop computers through the assistance of hardware vendors.

Mail and Web access setup: In most mid-sized manufacturing companies, email setup is based on either a publicly hosted mail server with POP accounts for all officers, or a small Windows-based PC acting as an internal mail server with practically zero controls, low robustness and poor scalability. Email flow usually goes down for more than an hour at least once a week. Some companies in fact find this downtime acceptable because their business processes have not begun to demand reliable email flow yet. For Web access, most companies have a DSL connection to the Internet and a DSL router providing NAT-based multiplexing of Internet accesses from all desktop PCs. There are no logs, controls, redundancy provisions or security measures.

One desktop dedicated per user: Typically, each user is given one desktop computer to use, and everything he needs and all the data he uses are stored on this desktop's hard disk. Each desktop needs to be administered separately, upgraded separately, and defended against viruses and malware individually.

File server: Many of these companies have file servers, though not all. Each user has some space on the file server for his files. Many of these file servers run ancient unsupported versions of Novell Netware (some with IPX/SPX even as late as 2007) or Windows NT v4. This does not prevent users from storing files on their desktops; most do in fact. The data on file servers is backed up using manual processes and is sometimes not backed up for days together. The data on desktops is usually never backed up. Emails, specially old mail folders, are almost always stored on the local desktop hard disks, and is never backed up.

Lean IT staff: Most of these companies do not have a proper IT Department with an IT budget. There are one or two junior programmers cum network operators who know how to operate the file servers, re-install software on desktop computers, configure printers and diagnose physical cabling problems with the Ethernet connections. These executives need clearance from the top management for an unexpected expenditure of even Rs.10,000 (USD 200). These computer maintenance executives do not have any skills in thinking of prevention, planning, or overall architecture; they spend their entire business hours reacting to incident after incident. Their real competence level is to tackle PC help-desk tech support situations. The companies however depend on this profile of executives to take their entire business processes to the next level where the enterprise will be networked and business processes will be computerised on an ERP backbone.

We have seen manufacturing companies with turnover exceeding USD 100 million and profits exceeding USD 10 million running their entire IS operations using a team of one or two executives of the profile described above. There is no one of the profile of manager in their IS Department. Clearly, this degree of unhealthy leanness of IS staff needs to be taken into account when offering any solution which will fit these companies.