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Larsen & Toubro

Construction Giant Runs Its Business In Real Time Across Remote Locations In India
The ECC Division of Larsen & Toubro Ltd., Indias leading construction company, plans to move its existing enterprise -wide management application to the latest Microsoft platform. Working with the Microsoft Technology Center, the organization has created an IT blueprint for the future using Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. The upgraded application will take advantage of several new features in these products to consolidate servers, rationalize IT infrastructure, enhance security and improve the performance and user experience for 400+ concurrent users.

Business Needs

Larsen & Toubro Limited (L&T) is India's largest engineering and construction conglomerate (2006-07 revenues INR 180 billion), with additional interests in electricals, electronics and IT. The ECC (Engineering Construction and Contracts) division undertakes large landmark projects such as expressways, bridges, nuclear power plants, airports, and industrial plants. Many of these are located in the remotest parts of the country.

ECC had distributed IT systems, running on an Alpha platform with open VMS as the operating system and an Oracle database. There was a need to upgrade to an ERP that met the companys requirements. The company was keen to move to a Web -based application, by which each of its 350+ project sites would be connected online to a centralized location.

In 2000, L&T ECC built and implemented an application called Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) to manage its entire business. The first version of EIP was built on Windows Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000. It was later migrated to Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005, with a further upgrade to 64-bit architecture.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 was closely integrated with EIP to track progress of individual projects, estimate completion times, and generate job cost reports.

To support EIP, the company built CEMA (Construction Enterprise Management Application) using Microsoft Visual FoxPro. It had client-server architecture to cater to 350+ construction sites. Currently, data between CEMA and EIP is periodically synchronized, and will co-exist, complementing each other. We need a Web-based solution to give the management access to real-time information. explains Mr. R. Giridharan, Senior Manager, L&T ECC.

Solution

L&T ECC has mapped the various core modules of EIP to CEMA. These include supply chain management, costing, asset management, financial accounting, CRM, and work order management. EIP also has additional modules such as legal, safety, e-procurement, and knowledge management.

The solution initially had seven instances of database at the regions and three at its headquarters in Chennai. After upgrading to SQL Server 2005 64-bit, the seven regional databases were consolidated and clustered for higher reliability.

With the help of the Microsoft Technology Center in Bangalore, L&T ECC will design and architect the next generation of EIP based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The application will be developed using Visual Studio 2008.

After moving to SQL Server 2008 64-bit, the regional and the central databases will be consolidated into a single cluster.

BenefitsReal Time Project Management

The web-based EIP helps ECC accurately plan and deploy resources across project sites. Management can view progress and drill down to data at any site. EIP helps us make better decisions and take timely action. We now close accounts within seven days of t he quarter-end, compared to the earlier one month. Moreover, at any point of time, data is never more than one day old, says Mr. Srinivasan.

Improved Security

Since CEMA is an offline solution, it is a high security risk. Mr. P. V. Jayaprakash, IT Infrastructure, L&T ECC, explains, The latest Microsoft stack has several improvements that will help us beef up the security of our application. These include:

Windows Server 2008 has a reduced attack surface, making it significantly more secure against external threats.

The new Windows Firewall permits creation of inbound and outbound rules that enables or disables specific ports.

SQL Server 2008 has a powerful and transparent data encryption feature.

Several new features in Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 will provide improved security.

The Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) hosts a replica of the Active Directory database, making remote site access totally secure.

SQL Server 2008 has greatly improved auditing capabilities.

Reduced Management and Costs

Reduction of cost and improving manageability were key objectives. With over 6000 stored procedures, 2000 tables and 35 databases, L&T ECC required a large IT team to manage even simple tasks such as updates and user queries.

Mr. P. Rengarajan, Senior Manager, L&T ECC

Adds Mr. Rengarajan, Other features that reduce cost and improve performance are:

Resource Governor in SQL Server 2008 allows allocation of dedicated resources for high priority tasks.

The Cross-site Copy feature of IIS 7.0 allows copying of Website settings across multiple Web servers.

SQL Server 2008 has a Performance Data Collection facility that lets administrators optimize database configuration.

The Future

Over the last three years, the average project size undertaken by ECC has increased from INR 1 billion to more than INR 10 billion. Says Mr. Srinivasan, Our EIP application has given us the confidence to take on bigger projects, and has been one of the key enablers of our rapid growth. Going forward, we intend to take up even larger projects in new areas, and EIP will continue to be an integral component of our ambitious growth plans.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

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Organization Size: 25 employees Organization Profile

ECC - the Engineering Construction & Contracts Division of L&T is India's largest construction organization. Many of the country's prized landmarks its exquisite buildings, tallest structures, largest industrial projects, longest flyovers have been built by ECC.
Hardware

Web server: HP Quad AMD Opteron with 8GB RAM Database server: IBM multi-processor 8-way Xeon cluster; 32 GB RAM each SAN: IBM DS 4800 with 4GB cache
Software and Services

Windows Server 2008 Microsoft .NET Framework Microsoft SQL Server Technologies Microsoft Office Project Technologies
Vertical Industries

Architecture, Engineering & Construction

Country/Region

India
Languages

English

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