Keeping abreast with changes in information technology (IT) is crucial to any organisation that wants to scale up and increase productivity. If a company is growing, your dependence on IT will grow with it. Output and expectations increase, timelines decrease, and efficiency is the word of the day. Whether the goal is profit or not, information technology is the linchpin to achieving the organisation’s vision and mission.

The Akshaya Patra Foundation has seen phenomenal growth in the 14 years since its inception. From feeding just 1,500 children across 5 schools in Bangalore, today the Foundation feeds over 1.4 million children in 23 locations across 10 states of India every day. Coordinating these efforts involving hundreds of people employed in different capacities across the kitchens and corporate headquarters is no easy feat. But the aggressive use of information technology has helped run the organisation like a well-oiled machine.

There are a few distinct ways in which Akshaya Patra utilises information technology: end–user support, IT infrastructure, security and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Akshaya Patra has taken decisive steps with its investment into information technology. Office 365 has been added to the email infrastructure. A Citrix XenApp server was set up to ensure that the servers are up and running all the time. Akshaya Patra has hired a data center facility to house servers and associated components. The Foundation migrated to Windows 7 and also implemented SharePoint to aid in the transfer of information.

The management team at Akshaya Patra understands the crucial role information technology plays in realising the organisation’s goals. Supporting the Foundation’s mission to feed 5 million children by 2020, the IT team at Akshaya Patra is already looking to the future to see how best they can contribute to achieving this target in the least amount of time. But Akshaya Patra’s modus operandi of implementing the latest in information technology, combined with the expertise of its IT team, certainly looks to have put the Foundation on the path to success.

Jagranjan Mishra, General Manager (Operations) at the Foundation’s Ahmedabad kitchen | Dinesh Shukla

The sun is barely up but Akshaya Patra’s kitchen at Ahmedabad is bustling with activity.

“With a capacity to produce 200,000 meals in five hours, the Ahmedabad kitchen is one of the largest cooking facilities in India,” says Jagranjan Mishra, General Manager of Operations at The Akshaya Patra Foundation. “It is certainly the largest kitchen dedicated to the Mid-day Meal Scheme, a programme by the Government of India that supplies free lunches on working days for children in schools to improve the nutritional health of school-going kids in India,” he explains.

Already tonnes of wheat flour are being loaded onto the roti-making machine to go through a sheeter and roller that controls the gauge of the dough. The dough is then cut by a die to make flat rounds which go via the conveyor to the baking oven before emerging as a roti (Indian flat bread). The machine can turn out 60,000 rotis in an hour!

Since Akshaya Patra is one of the major providers of these mid-day meals, much research and innovative thinking has gone into automating the kitchens, thereby ensuring high production and hygiene in the cooking process.

“Our recently built Ahmedabad kitchen supplies about 130,000 lunches to around 526 schools in seven talukas of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar districts. The daily challenge is to ensure the freshly cooked meals can reach the schools within the minimum cooking-to-consumption time. For this, some technologies used in manufacturing industries have been adapted to the kitchen, perhaps for the first time”, Jagranjan adds.

The roti-making machine was incorporated into the cooking infrastructure to appeal to the palettes of the children from North India. This was done to help optimise nutrition and consumption of the mid-day meal among the students all over the country.

“At Gandhinagar apart from the 60,000 rotis per hour machine, we have a standby machine that can take over if needed. In Gujarat the set lunch menu also includes local favourites like dal dhokli, thepla or sukdi (Indian savoury dishes), and a jaggery based sweet dish apart from the staples of roti with sabzi (vegetable) or dal (lentils) and rice,” he says.

Mishra says Akshaya Patra came to Gujarat after Narendra Modi visited their Bangalore facility in 2007. They started kitchens to provide mid-day meals to schools at Gandhinagar, Vadodara and Surat. “We got good support from the CSR (corporate social responsibility) wings of PSUs (public service undertakings) like ONGC, GSPC, GACL and GIPC and local donors,” he says. “In Surat, apart from schools we have also taken up Integrated Child Development Scheme’s in Anganwadis. In 2014, we shifted from the rented premises in Gandhinagar to set up this kitchen on a two-acre plot in Ahmedabad.”

In the kitchen the roti-making machine is the center piece on the ground floor. Upstairs, there are cauldrons and tanks for making dal, vegetables and other foods, while the top floor is the pre-process area where sorting and cutting takes place.

“This is perhaps the first time in India that the gravity flow process previously used for factory materials has been adapted to a kitchen,” Mishra says. “All the machines are linked to conveyors and chutes that channel the prepared food down to the ground floor without any human handling. They are loaded onto vehicles that are customised to hold vessels upright in a honeycomb structure and designed for minimal temperature loss between leaving the kitchen and reaching the school.”

This highly mechanised, streamlined kitchen has certainly met the mark, as Mishra agrees saying their audits show students are getting their meals on time and are happy with their lunches.

– By Anil Mulchandani

Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/A-Moveable-Feast-Across-Gujarat-Schools/2014/09/28/article2450929.ece