How L&T is engineering an AI-driven conglomerate
Technology helps reduce waste and pilferage, increase productivity for all its low-margin biz.
Most buildings across the campuses of the $25-billion Larsen & Toubro Group (L&T) in India resemble those of any typical engineering and construction company. But here’s where much of the similarity ends. When you drive into the Chennai campus that is the digital hub of L&T, for instance, the person you meet would already know that you have arrived, thanks to automated geofencing that monitors your location.
This is just an example of how India’s largest engineering and infrastructure conglomerate has been using digital technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, geofencing, internet of things (IoT) devices, drones, robotic process automation, as well as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) tools to keep a hawk eye on its assets across the country.
These tools are all aimed at reducing waste and pilferage, increasing productivity and growth of L&T’s low-margin businesses. “Digitization is impacting our business, qualitatively and quantitatively, tangibly, and intangibly,” said S.N. Subrahmanyan, who took over as the group’s chairman and managing director on 1 October 2023, after A.M. Naik stepped down as non-executive chairman.
Digitalization “is empowering teams to predict better, improve productivity, reduce cost and wastage, make more informed decision, enhancing efficiencies, and deliver faster to customers,” Subrahmanyan said in an interview with Mint.
The firm’s digital journey primarily revolves around materials, machines, and people. For one, L&T’s command centre, that provides a one-stop dashboard for Subrahmanyan while reviewing the group’s leaders, is connected to about 14,000 devices (total of 30,000) on an IoT platform. This dashboard also enables team leaders to detect fuel pilferage at any of the company’s 600 sites within 10 seconds—the fuel dispensed
DIGITIZATION is impacting business, qualitatively, quantitatively, tangibly, intangibly, says CMD
THE move will also empower teams, boost productivity, reduce costs and minimise wastage
gets tracked and captured with the help of active RFID tags.
L&T can also digitally measure the exact quantity of concrete produced at its plants with the help of sensors, giving its business heads a complete footprint of cement production, transportation and delivery. Besides, the group has over 300 fully-automated digital weighbridge systems, and computer vision cameras to measure the net weight of materials worth ₹1.2-billion purchased annually, including concrete or cement,
steel, diesel, aluminium and copper.
The group has onboarded 2.5 million contractual workers on its so-called Worker Induction and Skill Assessment (WISA) system, which helps managers track the location of each worker, monitor daily productivity, and even suggest