L&T'S TECH AVATAR

How India’s largest engineering company is shedding the haggage of construction to reinvent as a tech-enahled firm.

- P.B. JAYAKUMAR AND NEVIN JOHN

WHEN THE LARGE WALL-MOUNTED digital screen switches on at the command centre of Larsen and Toubro (L&T), chairman and managing director S.N. Subrahmanyan takes a break from his reading and glances through data from one corner to the other. The screen is connected to around 14,000 devices and machines such as heavy-lifting cranes, road rollers, earth-moving machines and AI cameras through Internet of Things (IoT) for real-time updates from project sites of the engineering and construction giant.

The command centre, next to the CMD’s cabin on the second floor of the Landmark building at Andheri East in Mumbai, gives him a complete perspective and granular view of L&T’s on-ground activities. If an unknown person enters the project site, everyone, from the project in-charge to Subrahmanyan, is alerted. If somebody moves around without a helmet on site, an alert is issued. Again, they will know, if a crane hired for a project is not fully utilised.

Subrahmanyan, who took over from A.M. Naik as chairman last year, has been driving the transition at L&T. Since the scope of improving margins is limited in the flagship engineering and construction (E&C) business-thanks to L1 or tender-based nature of business, escalating input costs, complex machines and construction equipment - L&T aimed to improve margins with higher efficiency through an asset-light model and better utilisation of machines and manpower, besides ensuring workers' safety.

If Naik built the construction vertical and founded new businesses, including IT and financial services, Subrahmanyan is consolidating core businesses and finding opportunities in emerging ones by using cash flow from the construction business, pivoting the firm into a technology led engineering and services conglomerate.