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Birla Cellulose is the Aditya Birla Group's umbrella brand for its range of cellulosic fibers and is a leader in producing viscose staple fiber. The division focuses its efforts on green R&;D, land conservation methods, water conservation systems and sustainable sourcing. As Birla Cellulose set up a new Manufacturing facility in Bharuch, Gujarat, it realized that efficiency and optimization in its IT infrastructure would pave the way for operational excellence on the ground. To that end, it was looking to deploy an integrated solution that would allow it to bring computing, storage and network systems under one banner for ease of management and allocation. Hitachi Data Systems answered the challenge with a solution based on Hitachi Compute Blade and Hitachi Unified Storage
The Challenge
The Birla Cellulose division, part of the Aditya Birla Group, was setting up a new manufacturing unit in Bharuch, Gujarat. This was, in essence, a Greenfield environment, with minimal constraints from prior work, since manufacturing operations had only recently commenced. While an in-house IT team oversaw the facility's many strategic applications, spanning procurement, design, production and distribution, it was looking for consolidation and optimization in its IT infrastructure. This approach would provide a unified platform under which the various applications, including document management, Microsoft Exchange, warehouse management, supply chain management and more, could be run. The infrastructure would serve as the backbone running through and supporting all the various strategic IT initiatives for the facility.
These applications were critical to Birla Cellulose for driving operational efficiency on the factory floor. However, the facility's employees sought a single interface through which they could manage these disparate applications. It was also critical to have adequate computing and data warehousing capabilities to handle and reliably store the large quantities of data that a typical manufacturing facility generates.
The Bharuch facility was also interested in post-sale service and support for the solution that...