AKR Industries Spearheads a Tech Revolution In Textiles with Cisco HyperFlex
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AKR Textiles was established in 1998 and has become one of the leading manufacturers, exporters, and suppliers of garments. For over two decades it has been producing high- quality garments for men, women, and kids, specializing in polos, printed tees, etc. Owing to its strong focus on quality and investing in cutting-edge technology, it now delivers products to a wide variety of renowned brands and clients throughout the world
| Executive summary |
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| Customer Name: AKR Industries Industry: Manufacturing Location: Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, India Number of Employees: 11,000 |
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| Challenges |
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Refresh IT to meet global demands
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Streamline supply chain while integrating IT operations from end to end
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Optimize operational expenses and plug financial leakages
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| Solutions |
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| Results |
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Reduced application deployment time helped save time and optimize investments
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A single window of control enabled 360-degree view of the entire IT topology
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Hyperconvergence at India’s biggest textile hub
Tirupur, located in the state of Tamil Nadu, is the country’s biggest hub for textile and knitwear, contributing to 90 percent of exports from India. For the past three decades, major domestic and international fashion brands have been contracting their manufacturing to companies in Tirupur. Currently, housing more than 3000 textile companies, Tirupur has, over the years, embraced technology to ensure smooth supply-chain operations and support state-of-the-art garment designing.
Owing to increased competition and an unpredictable business climate, companies in Tirupur are finding themselves in need of better solutions for optimized end-to-end operations and customer delight. One such company in Tirupur that believes in revolutionizing the textile industry through modern technology interventions is AKR Industries. Besides serving fashion labels in France, Spain, Italy, and Denmark, the company also serves the domestic Indian apparel market through clients such as Hindustan Unilever, BPL, and Britannia Industries. Since it started operations in 1998, AKR Industries today has grown to a potential manufacturing capacity of 25 million pieces of garments in a year. While the company has made a steady investment in technology over the years, it was time to take the plunge into the world of hyperconvergence.
Intending to achieve what is called “single-window control,” AKR Industries chose Cisco to transform its IT backbone. While the primary aim was to further optimize supply-chain and data warehousing, the company envisioned a mechanism where all the spokes of IT operations – virtualization, storage, servers, and more – could be unified and managed centrally. Additionally, AKR Industries needed to optimize its operational expenses and plug financial leakages. The company partnered with Cisco and realized that the Cisco HyperFlex solution would solve all of its multitiered challenges.
All of AKR Industries’ challenges could be answered through hyperconvergence. The company needed to transform its operations by deriving deep insights from its legacy as well as cloud applications, using the DevOps methodology and integrating its IT operations. Cisco HyperFlex™ is built specifically to solve this complex challenge.
When Prabhakaran Govindhasamy, IT Manager of AKR Industries, said, “Our goal is to eliminate silos, not create them,” Cisco understood that HyperFlex was the answer – a solution that provides the choice and flexibility of scale for storage, compute-only nodes, or a single converged node. In other words, a single cluster can be expanded up to a total of 64 nodes, at will, using Cisco HyperFlex.
Additionally, Cisco’s Hyperflex solution could be deployed over a short period and didn’t require highly specialized personnel. In a tier-2 city like Tirupur, this proves to be a huge advantage since quality talent is usually hard to come by. The built-in automation of HyperFlex makes management simple and more efficient. Together with an integrated and simplified networking operations, the company could achieve seamless efficiency along with a single management approach that delivers better insights.
Unlike any other solution in the market, the Cisco HyperFlex platform is faster to deploy, simpler to manage, and easier to scale and provides a unified pool of resources to power business applications. Additionally, all Cisco HyperFlex clients have access to the Cisco® Technical Assistance Center (TAC), an award-winning, round-the-clock service that accelerates the time for issue resolution.
“We’ve been able to reduce our application infrastructure deployment time from days to just a few minutes. More importantly, our performance has almost doubled. So, Cisco HyperFlex was the perfect fit for us”.
-Prabhakaran Govindhasamy, IT Manager, AKR Industries
Today, AKR Industries is shaping up the future-ready textile vendor of choice for global customers. Adopting hyperconvergence is helping the company to rapidly accelerate, innovate, and disrupt the market.
Learn more about Cisco Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) here.