'Lock down has lead to lower productivity'

Gyan Pandey, CIO, Aurobindo Pharma Ltd.

“We are in Pharma manufacturing business and are in export business. Our business is mainly driven from the demand from the overseas market. Of the overseas market, our 70% sales come from US only. We are in B2B business. As such we manufacture and supply based on the advance form orders from our overseas subsidiaries which in turn do the business Make to Order (MTO). Due to COVID , there is no significant impact on our sales , but indirect impact on the revenue is there because lock down lead to lower productivity and efficiency and logistic challenges in shipment of goods , At times, we have to opt for Charter flights for the shipment , which has raised the logistic cost very high and eroding margins drastically.

Before lockdown, we have very minimal foot print of VPN users and post lock down this requirement increased by multifold times. We as a manufacturing organization don’t have any WFH as a policy nor do we have a culture of working from Home in the past. But lock down mandated to do the continuous business we need to enable our workforce to get connected in a secured and fast way. We opted different solutions for those who are having company assets and those who need to be enabled on their own devices (BYOD). We scaled up from 300 users to 1800 users in ¾ days.

We Created 2 setups for WFH

a. Company provided assets Desktop and Laptops with which users connect corporate firewall via VPN for with security policies in place by providing access only to required services according to his profile, all assets are tracked with company applied policies by asset management tool and end point security which is monitored on daily basis.

b. Users Personal Assets used for WFH, for these users we built a separate firewall with a separate internet link connecting to External firewall with access to LAN only on RDP protocol. Security and comforters of user are considered as main focus. A user using this setup can only connect to his office desktop on RDP protocol and work as if at office, security settings related to data transfer to and from office PC to Personal computer and vice versa are being restricted via group policies on his office desktop

s IT team were also working remotely and many of the users are first time users and with all diverse sets of devices (because of BYOD), we have to do lot of handholding to ensure that all users are getting the access of applications and are working effectively. We established 18/7 IT Helpdesk team and ensured aggressive support and resolution time so as users should get their issues addressed in shortest possible time.

We also created a ready ref for common issue to our Helpdesk engineers for issue resolution.For reporting purpose, we used multiple tools for access control and activity duration for each user.”