Event in Review: SAP Seminar – National Foods

April, 28, 2010 – Post CIO Campus Conversations, today was the day when the industry visited FAST again in an attempt to abide to the promise made earlier. At 2:30 pm, the Deputy Manager of National Foods, Danish Nafay walked into the auditorium of FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, to deliver a seminar on SAP ERP solutions, as a follow-up of Campus Conversations.

The Head of the Computer Science Department of FAST, Dr. Zafar Nasir, introduced Danish Nafay to a group of seniors and a few juniors, keenly awaiting his arrival. The excitement in the air was nevertheless justifiable as it is not a daily affair to have an opportunity to interact with the Deputy Manager of a huge brand such as National Foods. Introducing himself and his organization, Danish started off the seminar with a comprehensive presentation on the background of the corporation noting that National Foods is a part of AGC (Associated Group of Companies), that also includes ATC, Raj Masala etc. After briefing the milestones reached by National’s Foods in each decade, ever since its establishment in 1970, he directed the crowd to observe the company’s the mission statement and how should it be understood by a computer science graduate. Making a linkage that translates out of the business’s MVO , helps bring a business edge to the technical competencies sought of computer science graduates hired, and what else is a better way to highlight is when there is a huge audience of potential graduates eagerly listening to you! Going ahead, he dived into the National Foods’ Core Values, being: Passion, Team Work, People-Centrism, Ethics, Customer Focused Excellence and Leadership, and tried to relate them to the Computer Science domain.

Apart from making a special mention of the efforts made toward women development as part of National Foods’ Corporate Social Responsibility, Danish quickly drove the audience into the IT Role of the company. As quoted by him, the role of IT at National Foods extends to department via:

• Communication and Collaboration
• Data Availability and Security
• Record Keeping and Reporting
• Decision Support System
• Legal Reporting and Compliance
• Proper Access Control
• Service KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – IT Helpdesk

Communicating in a language most familiar to Computer Science graduates, Mr. Danish further stated that the deployed SAP system is distributed over FOUR different locations, via VPN connectivity in major cities of Pakistan, along with SEVEN data warehouses. The audiences were further enlightened with the antivirus and security requirements of the corporation and went deep into the high quality server architecture at National Foods. The attendees were told that the AD server of National Foods is decentralized so that even if connectivity gets disturbed in one local area, the overall user login process and access is not disturbed.

As the seminar approached its crux, Danish introduced the audience to different modules and functioning of SAP R/3 (an ERP software for order fulfillment) apart from highlighting the fundamentals of activity-based costing that set the rules behind every product’s buying and selling, BI Content line, receptive queries, and a lot of other domain information.

Apart from describing the Presentation Server, Application Server and the Database Server of SAP R/3’s 3-tier client-server model and different releases of SAP, Danish also enlightened the audience with the company’s workflow breakdown, quality assurance and product testing systems and processes that led to a closing note by the speaker. The eager audience at FAST didn’t stay behind either and raised an interactive discussion in a Q&A session that followed next.

Some of concerns/questions raised were the following:

• Some students expressed a desire to see SAP software running and operational, in order to get a feel and idea of how the renowned and prolific solution works, and also wanted to visit National Foods’ IT department in this regard. Mr. Danish agreed to give the students a chance to ride the monster, if it is feasible in the days to come.
• Danish also emphasized his interest in giving guidelines for Final Year Projects to work in the field of character recognition such as ICR (like OCR) and felt that the company needs individuals with such expertise.
• Danish also clarified the hiring process, explaining the experienced VS fresh candidate tradeoff, stating:
  • “Apparently there’s no issue in hiring either of the two, but the tradeoff lies in spending precious business time on training fresh grads as compared to experienced consultants with good domain knowledge, in turn of less salary.”
  • A follow-up Interactive discussion that showed enthusiasm of FAST students who were willing to learn from the opportunity being extended to them by industry representatives like Danish Nafay, helped CIO Pakistan in keeping in another promise!

[Show as slideshow]