Home Interview Interview: Ajit Prashar, Group IT Head (GM), Best Group

Interview: Ajit Prashar, Group IT Head (GM), Best Group

by CIO AXIS

CIO AXIS: What’s the IT roadmap of Madhusudan Auto Limited? Within your organisation what is the most significant digital achievement of the past 12 months?

Ajit Prashar: Along with Madhusudan Auto, there are many more Auto ancillaries. All these are Part of BEST GROUP. Under one umbrella in next one year, we may bring the uniformity in technology. It’ll help us to develop the efficiency, make work faster and leverage the benefit of knowledge transfer.

I recently joined this Group and since then, we have streamlined many businesses processes, resulted information is readily available in the shape of reports or email workflow.

In terms of digitalization, we have already started our journey. Recently we have implemented DMS in SAP. These are the few direct benefits, which we may get instantly.

  • Common Single repository for document storage.
  • Easily availability of data.
  • Manage product change control and workflow.
  • Fast and secure document processing.

CIO AXIS: What are the technologies that will characterize the next phase of digital transformation at Madhusudan Auto Limited?

Ajit Prashar: In any manufacturing company, other than any business application such as SAP, BAN, Navision etc. users are used to do many business-related activities outside the box in the form of manual registers, Ms-Word, or Ms-Excel. In next phase our main target will be to MAP all those activities in common business application. Other than that, our focus will be on communication between business application and Machine. With this we can remove manual intervention to avoid all human related error.

To develop this architecture, we have in house strength, and they can develop and design the PCB board and application either in PHP or Python.

In totality within less than 2 years down the line we’ll achieve our paperless office and Industrial 4.0 target.

CIO AXIS: With your experience of steering technology, can you please share some of the unique lessons learned?

Ajit Prashar: Yes, I have more then 22 year of experience and during this tenure I have learned many things. Out of those following are few of them.

  1. Never say no, but in few cases you must, in the interest of Organisation.
  2. Be loyal with your job profile, rest of things will come automatically follow.
  3. Always believe in long term solution, try to avoid firefighting.
  4. If you believe & deliver technology, then people will start believing in you.
  5. Many technology leaders believe in capitalization upon low hanging fruits. But being in IT we must focus and strategies for a long-term prospective vision.

CIO AXIS: Since insiders have more access to information, what kind of processes do you have in place to prevent unauthorized use of information? How is Madhusudan Auto Limited’s cyber security strategy going forward?

Ajit Prashar: Now a days information plays a very vital role in any Organisation. Any loose link and you are out of business. Hence, to keep organisation data safe, first you must classify the data. Further based upon business need, user role and responsibility also need to define for limited access to data.

At file server level with AD (Active Directory) we can restrict the type of access and in some cases, we are using VLAN to bifurcate the network.

Cyber Security is really a pain for any IT Head, CISO or CTO. We are securing all the possible gateways (Entry point in local network). But without end user awareness and training all the possible efforts will be in vain. Single phishing email will destroy all your barricades if he/she may click on malicious link or replied.

Therefore, to prevent an unpleasant surprise our major focus is on user training and surprise drill with the help of 3rd party application. Along with this to avoid vulnerability exploitation proper application patch management at OS level is also mandatory.

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