Cat 6 meets the needs

Alok Industries had to shift to Cat 6 cabling. As its business kept growing, Alok focussed on IT. Its home-grown applications could no longer cope with its expanding business—islands of information were attached to the legacy applications.

There were factory applications too (fabric inwards, quality inspection and goods receipt note) that were used for everything from capturing production data to tracking finished products; these were written in FoxPro, and hence it took more than five days for the company to file an MIS report.

The project was divided into three phases. Initially, copper and fibre cabling within the premises, plant-to-plant outdoor, and underground cabling were carried out. The company decided to deploy an ERP solution to enable the integration of multiple functions carried out at six different locations in Navi Mumbai, Vapi and Silvassa. High-end networking infrastructure was needed to run the ERP system efficiently and achieve maximum RoI.

A combination of D-Link IP cameras, proper connectivity, switches and routers made the monitoring activity simple. The network has been designed in such a way that it can be upgraded to 10G in the future. The manageability features of the switch enable online monitoring and bandwidth control. Further voice, video and data can travel on the same network without throughput issues, which will enable future projects to function at their best on the same network.