Wipro Chairman Azim H. Premj's Coimbatore visit
COIMBATORE: On Friday, Suguna Poultry Farm Limited, a poultry major here, had a special guest. Wipro Chairman Azim H. Premji visited its head office, sat through a presentation and went to its information technology development centre.
"We are honoured," beamed B. Soundararajan, managing director of Suguna. "It was a courtesy visit. We did not have time for any interaction." Talking to The Hindu , Mr. Soundararajan said: "Wipro is coming to Coimbatore and they are ready to associate with us for our future IT developments."
Asked why Mr. Premji chose to come to Suguna, an agro-based company that was not a Wipro customer, Mr. Soundararajan said: "I feel it is because we are more dependent on technology. We have integrated IT into poultry. Further, we work more in rural areas." Suguna was one of the four units Mr. Premji visited here on Friday.
The company started using computers since 1992 and rolled out the first phase of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in July 2006. More than 90 per cent of business processes at the Rs. 1,100-crore company is based on IT. It has 12,000 farmers in 8000 villages and sells broiler in 10 States. With inventory in multiple locations, employees spread across different States and people of different languages and knowledge levels involved in daily business, Suguna decided to become more IT-based for its daily operations and adopted the ERP system. The company plans to bring some of its external partners too under the system next year.
