Cisco to digitize Akshaya Patra operations

Cisco today announced an agreement with Akshaya Patra Foundation which will be accelerating digitization of 7 kitchens across pan-India.

Akshaya Patra Foundation is the world’s largest (non-profit) mid-day meal programme serving wholesome food to over 1.66 million children from 13,958 schools across 12 states in India. Digitization of Akshaya Patra kitchens and key offices will help them realize significant gains in productivity, scalability, and cost-efficiency and accelerate Akshaya Patra’s goal to reach 5 million children by 2020.

As part of this agreement, Cisco will deploy an enterprise-grade network and collaboration suite connecting their kitchens and their offices by enabling end to end IT & process digitization. The upgraded Akshaya Patra network will connect their offices in Bangalore, Gurgaon, and field kitchens across 7 locations (2 kitchens in Bangalore, one each in Lucknow, Vrindavan, Bellary, Guwahati, and Jigani) on a single network which will enable them to efficiently track their kitchen production, distribution, supply chain and logistics.

Through digitization, Akshaya Patra will have faster and better connectivity in their field offices which is critical to the kitchen’s operational performance, and necessary to support virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing. In addition, Akshaya Patra can now analyze, and operationalize disparate sets of data in near real-time helping them to improve the overall speed, security and responsiveness of the programme.

This digitization effort is expected to increase Akshaya Patra’s operational efficiency by about 5% in the initial phase, which will help them extend the mid-day meal program to over 28,500 students everyday immediately.

“Cisco is committed to supporting scalable and self-sustaining programs that use technology to address some of society’s biggest challenges. For the past 20 years, we have applied our technology and expertise to accelerate global problem solving and positively affect people, society, and the planet,” said Tae Yoo, Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Cisco.

“Currently most of the data collection and planning is manual; with a rapidly growing network of kitchens, the network platform we are putting in place today will help us in our digitization journey by enabling real-time data collection, streamline kitchen production, distribution and supply chain. All of this will help us in our mission to reach more children,” Shridhar Venkat, Chief Executive Officer, The Akshaya Patra Foundation.

“Using the power of the network to digitally enable nonprofit organizations such as Akshaya Patra is a great example of how technology can help solve the world’s most challenging problems. We are committed to focusing on solutions that can be scaled to benefit millions in underserved communities around the world,” said VC Gopalratnam, SVP-IT and CIO-International, Cisco.