Shyam Steel, a legacy business of 69 years, embarked on its cloud journey in 2018 with Amazon Web Services. Since then, the organization has sped up its operations on various fronts, be it on routine tasks like monitoring, security, and report generation or on complicated tasks like backing up data which took most of their time previously.  

Throughout the pandemic, their digital transformation journey continued, and they grew tremendously. 

Due to this, Lalit Beriwala, Director at Shyam Steel Industries Ltd, has seen a significant increase in positive growth projections thanks to the predictive cloud properties. In a one-on-one conversation with SMEonCloud, he talks about Shyam Steel’s digital transformation journey and how the cloud has revolutionized their business processes. 

Please share a little about yourself and your organization

I have been working as the Director at Shyam Steel Industries Ltd. Speaking about Shyam Steel, it’s one of the leading primary TMT Bar manufacturers in India with an annual turnover of Rs 4,000 crores. Guided by a philosophy to produce safe and sustainable steel, it is a pioneer in the quality production of steel.  

We started our operations with a small factory in Howrah. Since then, Shyam Steel has created a legacy of 69 years and has emerged as a large, growing, competitive and multi-product steel organization by delivering quality material through innovation, excellence, and dedication.  

The group has four state-of-the-art integrated steel plants located in Durgapur, Mejia, Bamunara, and Howrah. Shyam Steel, a 40 billion group has emerged as a steel giant with its presence firmly placed in the infrastructure segments including the Indian Railways, Defence, Ports, Roads & Highways, Airports, Energy, and other key areas of national importance. Having a highly satisfied customer base and a pan India sales & marketing network with an extremely professional team and a dynamic logistics support system, Shyam Steel has witnessed a stellar financial performance with faster growth even during the critical phase of the steel industry. 

The recent disruptions brought about by technological advancements and the pandemic have accelerated the digital transformation journeys of almost all organizations today. How did your organization address this and what were the main business objectives and challenges that drove your digitalization journey?  

During the pandemic, it was quite difficult to establish a connect with our customers directly since physical meetings with our sales team were not safe. To resolve this conundrum and to keep the business moving, a calling system was launched which is an AI virtual assistant chatbot to reach the customers directly on a day-to-day basis. This allowed us to understand the customers’ complaints and their suggestions and resolve them through the right channels. Through this model, wellness and COVID awareness calls were also made to ensure the safety of our customers. We have executed the Twilio Voice Calling Bot & Virtual Assistant in full acceleration mode to organize the unorganized areas. 

With this digitization charter, what technology solutions did you adopt?  

It was important to understand our customers’ grievances, their requests and their complaints. This was addressed by building a mobile app. Through this application, customer feedback was taken on a live basis which also enabled the Shyam Steel team to allocate our resources directly.  

The feedback could be logged in the mobile app which was done through a distributed communication system that was directly transferred to the customer care support team. The entire process provided us with quick turn-around times while resolving issues. On an average, a 20% increase in resolutions was ascertained, leading to another milestone.  

How are you measuring the impact of your digital initiatives? What are the key success metrics for you?  

The impact is measured through customer satisfaction which has been improving on a regular basis and the reduction in recurring tasks by the company’s workforce management. Tasks are being automated and the workforce is being deployed and involved in business strategy instead. This has further helped our business to build a roadmap that will help in giving our organization a clear goal. It also helps us in predicting and meeting the changing demands of the current market. 

This has also helped us in achieving business insights since live data is made available to us and the analytics have enabled the management to take appropriate and preventive action before any problem crops up.