A strategic approach to streamline information system at HAL

Abstract

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is the Country's premier Aeronautical Complex and one of the biggest and most sophisticated Aircraft industries in Asia. The Company is a multi-product, multi-divisional and multi-dimensional organisation, having 13 production units located across the country. The Corporate Management including the Chairman and functional directors of the company are stationed at Corporate Office, Bangalore. It is felt that due to dynamic business environment, complexity in Aircraft business, need in co-ordination among the divisions and outside agencies and to evaluate the performance of the company, the Corporate Management should have an easy and faster access to various information at optimised cost. In HAL an exhaustive MIS is in operation though it doesn't cover all aspects of company's business. Present MIS is not sufficient to fulfil the information needs of the Management. Recently, company's most of the divisions have installed advanced data processing equipments. At Corporate office a powerful Local Area Network (LAN) is under installation. An effort also has been made to link all the divisions by establishing E-mail facility. Ahuge investment is incurred towards these infrastructure and its maintainance. As a result of which the information cost at HAL has been jacked up though very offen, the Corporate Management fails to have easy and faster accessibility to required information. This project work proposes to implement a fully computerised integrated information system using the existing data processing equipments and by connecting them with suitable communication link, which will enable Corporate Office to have an easier and faster access to the required information. To obtain this, several uniform data bases covering the various functions of the company to be maintained and updated at division level. As and when required, from Corporate Office the necessary data can be picked up and can be presented to the decision makers in a suitable form. The existing information system and the additional information needs have been analysed and an attempt has been made to simplify it so that the same can be put in data bases, designed by using suitable data base design technique. This will offer a high level of flexibility in analysis and generation of information in various fashion. A study has been conducted about the vanuos communication links including the existing setup of HAL and those available in the market, the various features they offer, the technology on which they function and their cost effectiveness. In addition to that, as a part of the project, a highly presentable and user friendly Software, "Executive Information System (EIS)" has been developed in Windows environment to provide highlights of the company to the top executives at their finger tips. At the end, this project concludes stating the various hurdles it has to overcome during its implementation and find suitable solutions to overcome them.