Spend-IT: ITC’s tech expenses shoot up as it bets big on digital tech

Indian business conglomerate ITC, which has a diversified presence across industries such as fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), hotels, software, packaging, paperboards, specialty papers and agribusiness besides cigarettes, stepped up its expenditure on technology a year after changing gears as it moves further into digital transformation of its operations.

Kolkata-headquartered ITC has 13 businesses in five segments and exports its products in 90 countries. The company has been leveraging new generation technologies across business lines for some time now.

For the year ended March 31, 2024, its tech expense growth at a standalone level rose by nearly 18%, the highest in recent years, to ₹367 crore. The company also has an IT arm and the tech spends include services rendered by it to the flagship company.

The firm that as a part of Industry 4.0 initiative, various tech innovations are being implemented in key verticals such as paper and foods. It implemented IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) sensors to monitor equipment condition and plan for predictive maintenance and reduce downtime.

ITC also installed a utility energy management system to capture real-time process data to develop insights using dashboards. In addition, it deployed an advanced computer vision system to detect product defects, empty wrappers etc. in biscuit manufacturing line.

The company also used analytics (including weather conditions input) to optimise process parameters for reducing moisture variations in the atta manufacturing line.

ITC also used a large pool of historical operational data and machine learning to develop predictive analysis for reducing the paper breakage and uptime of paper machines, improving steam utilisation efficiency, and reducing chemical consumption, among others in the paper business.

The company has prioritised cyber security as one of its key areas of focus. In the previous year, a maturity assessment of its cyber security architecture was undertaken by a global network and security solutions provider. The study found that its cyber security systems and processes are on par with global leaders and outperformed local peers.

It is looking to enhance surveillance and response capabilities with augmentation of technologies and skills of a NextGen Cyber Security Operations Centre (SOC). With progressive transitioning of mission-critical data and transaction processing workloads to the Cloud, the network infrastructure of the organisation is also being transformed using contemporary network and security technologies into a Digital-Ready, Cloud-Secure wide area network.

ITC has also identified Information Technology-Operational Technology (IT-OT) integration for Industrial Control Systems as a focus area as the convergence and integration between IT and OT is increasing exponentially. In this regard, a Continuous Threat Detection and Response (CTDR) platform is in the process of being progressively rolled out across the firm.

It also implemented a Digital Audit Management System last year for digitalisation of audit life cycle management, thereby enhancing the efficiency and productivity of the function.

Spend-IT is a running series where Techcircle scans through tech spending and budgets of companies in India