R D Malav
VP - IT (Corporate)
Jindal Group
 With over 20 years of overall IT experience, RD Malav is currently entrusted with formulating the IT strategy for the Jindal Group. In an exclusive interview with Faiz Askari, Bureau Head, Network Computing, Malav, who joined the group a few months back for a second tenure, discusses his responsibilities, achievements and challenges.
Career progression: A specialist in automotive, consumer goods and petrochemicals based manufacturing segment, Malav spent seven years in Rungta Irrigation Ltd as IT manager in the initial phase of his career. He worked with Jindal Group from January 1998 to June 2006 as its GM –IT Corporate, and worked with Subros Ltd as its Vice President Corporate - IT from July 2006 to Nov 2007. Then he rejoined the Jindal Group in his current capacity. Over the years, Malav has picked up functional expertise in JIT supply-chain integration and Web enablement, besides ERP implementation.
Job responsibilities at Jindal Group: Malav’s core responsibility is to manage end user IT requirements and their training needs, apart from managing in-house and outsourced projects. It is his responsibility to formulate the IT strategy for the organization and implement the same. Other key areas of responsibilities include aligning IT strategy to business strategy; managing IT department for multi-location and multi-company organization; mentoring the IT team (recruitment, training and appraisals); and extensive vendor interactions and formulation of SLAs.
Current or recent initiatives: Adoption of green IT concept in the organization by replacing CRT Monitors with TFT monitors, server consolidation and optimization using virtualization technologies, besides successfully deploying an information security management system.
Future roadmap: The next one year will be focused at optimizing applications using web technologies. The core focus in this project will remain on providing easy access to the users for all enterprise applications. Also looking at bringing easy access dashboard solution for all the top executives.
Career best deployments: Implementation of SAP R/3 4.6B for Jindal Group of Companies (Jindal Poly Films Ltd. & Jindal Photo Ltd.) for 6 physical locations, 15 Plants and 8 business modules. Apart from this, he also upgraded SAP R/3 4.6B to R/3 Enterprise 4.7 SR2 within two months. Malav feels that in-house maintenance and rollout of SAP was another big achievement for his career. Apart from this, while working for Subros, he had implemented TeamCenter Engineering 2005, a product lifecycle management (PLM) system including CAD, CAE, CFD & CAM operations in a distributed environment.
Career challenge: The only challenge that he came across is to get the participation of functional people in any new technology adoption. “Educating the functional heads and their human resources about any new deployment becomes challenging at times,” he says.
Other interests: Reading and Photography are two of his interest areas. He enjoys reading industry magazines and business newspapers. He also likes to shoot – with his digital camera, that is.
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