To convert all coal production-related information into digital format and bring in transparency in the coal industry, Coal India's chairman and managing director Pramod Agarwal on Monday inaugurated a Rs 150-crore project of connecting 388 locations of Western Coal Fields (WCL) Ltd through MPLS VPN Links provided by RailTel.
The Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) VPN allows several sites to interconnect transparently through a service provider's network.
The inauguration event was held at Nagpur. The MPLS VPN method will enable the coal sector to function more efficiently and contribute towards enhanced productivity as it will minimise the manual record-keeping work.
The network built and maintained by RailTel is also a crucial requirement in the implementation of a single instance Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) across Coal India Ltd (CIL)- christened ‘Project Passion’.
ERP refers to software used in companies to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.
RailTel has recently completed work of connecting 146 locations of Northern Coalfields Limited, 240 locations of Eastern Coalfields Limited, and four locations of North Eastern Coalfields on a secured MPLS-VPN network.
Talking about this project, CMD of RailTel Puneet Chawla said, “Coal sector is a crucial sector. Since January this year, we have received orders of over Rs 700 crore from various subsidiaries of Coal India. We expect to commission around 380 MPLS VPN links for Central Coalfields Ltd. by November end. We expect further revenue growth given the need for digitalisation across the sector.”
Apart from MPLS VPN, RailTel will also provide Lease Line Services, Internet Bandwidth, CCTV Implementation, HD video conferencing, LAN/WAN Connectivity, etc. to coal companies.
