TCS Transformers - Jan 2011

An IDG Custom SOLUTIONS initiative IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Transforming Business Through Judicious Application of IT

Training Tally

to Track Supply Chain Tata Teleservices Limited reaches out to its pre-paid customers via a countrywide network of almost 6000 distributors who deal with recharge cards and handsets. The ability to track product uptake geography wise at these distributors has given the telecom giant a competitive edge.

PLUS INTERVIEW Ravi Viswanathan, Head, Telecom Services Business, TCS, speaks about the trends and challenges in the telecom sector. He also gives his inputs on what operators can do to keep in check the fall in Revenue per User (RPU).

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

partner visibility ENABLES

Better decision making Company Tata Teleservices Ltd. Industry Telecommunication Offering Country wide GSM and CDMA connections.

Tata Teleservices Limited has a wide range of mobile offerings that are delivered to consumers via a countrywide network of almost 6000 distributors. The ability to track product uptake geography wise has given the telecom giant a competitive edge. Here is how its Executive President Enterprise Business and Technology, A.G. Rao achieved this.

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

espite the exploding subscriber base, telecom companies are seeing a fall in RPU (Revenue per User). The dynamics in this market have clearly moved beyond the basics of carrier networks and the waging of price wars. The increasing customer base offers something to every service provider, but those that take the biggest chunk of this pie are the ones who optimize their processes better, have in-depth knowledge of their markets and ensure not a single customer is turned down. Tata Teleservices Limited (Tata Tele) utilized IT to bring in a transformation in managing their distributors.

This solution has given us a unique competitive edge.

No other telco has such a tool currently. “ AG RAO, Executive President - Enterprise Business and Technology, Tata Teleservices Ltd.

The Channel Challenge Telecom service providers cater to their prepaid customer base through partners who form a network of distributors and retailers. Given the size of the market, in terms of customers, distributors, and number of products (various recharge schemes as well as handsets), telecom service providers encounter various challenges in catering to varying customer demand and tracking the performance of their products. For a pan-India telecom service provider like Tata Tele, knowing which of its products work better in specific regions — and which don’t — enable strategic planning. It’s the sort of data that enables demand forecasting and management of physical products like recharge scratch cards.

This calls for knowing how many units have been consumed of a given product in near real time.

The obvious approach — which other telecom companies tried, with only partial success was installing an application at the distributors’ end that was tied online to the telecom company’s ERP. Telecom executives would then ask distributors to enter sales data (like information regarding which products have been bought by a particular retailer) manually. The application would then send that information to the service provider’s ERP. Sounds simple, but there’s a catch: almost all distributors already use an accounting software, the ubiquitous Tally, to manage their finances. By asking distributors to input data into the service provider’s application, telecom executives were basically asking them to replicate work — without any tangible benefit to them.

The automation of such data flow across the distribution channel enables sales and performance tracking across all the distribution points. But this

automation was met with various roadblocks that are common across service providers.

Firstly, it was not possible to implement standard business processes and rules across the distribution channel due to localized sales management solutions owned by distributors (mostly based on Tally) . Combined with the distributors’ reluctance in keying the same data manually in different systems, deploying a separate tool was out of question (this would have been the standard approach). In many parts of the country, persons running distributorships are not well versed in English, which is the default language adopted in the GUI in India. To gain acceptance from the entire channel partner base, the solution had to be multi lingual.

INDIA MOBILE STATS June 2010: 600 million mobile subscribers.

Gartner’s prediction for 2014: 990+ million.

The Solution: PULSE Power

Tata Tele and their long standing technology partner, TCS were not about to take the conventional route by either coaxing channel partners, or by offering expensive incentive schemes to garner channel support. TCS went beyond problem solving, by completely circumventing the problem itself. The project that made this happen was Pulse – a combination of Tally, the commercial accounting package, and a centralized backend system that brings the comprehensive list of functionalities for both internal channel stakeholders and external channel partners (distributors). TCS knew only too well that Tally is a favorite amongst distributors and

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

with some quick thinking, they got a customized version of Tally built for them.

The look and feel remained the same except for a new, nifty, yet unobtrusive feature.

Now information entered into Tally is captured by an add-on and sent to Tata Tele’s ERP system when an Internet connection is detected. To the end user, this process is transparent, and they could continue to use Tally without interruption even when the update is in progress.

Since channel partners did not have to put in extra effort to make this system work, they did not resent it. In fact, the system helps distributors by showing them their existing credit limit (used for e-recharges) with Tata Tele and the credit limits that various retailers have with them.

The project was envisioned to transform Tata Tele’s channel approach by providing additional features and power to the business users, keeping the channel partners in mind. The distribution needs had to be studied in depth not only from a Tata Tele perspective but also from a distributor perspective. Some key features of Pulse that makes this possible are detailed as below: Pulse helps the company define its complete distribution hierarchy starting from senior management (business heads) to the last point i.e., retailers and maps the relationship between them functionally and geographically.

The inventory management module in Pulse is a key differentiator with real time inventory view helping define company specific thresholds at each distribution point. It has an auto-purchase order process to replenish stock.

Primary sales (Tata Tele to distributors) and secondary s a le s ( d i s t r i b u t o r s t o retailers), and activations m a d e b y re ta i le rs a re captured real time, thus enabling Tata Tele, as well as distributors to view performance online.

Pulse addresses a key requirement from the distributors – a single system with single data entry to manage both company’s needs as well distributors needs against having two separate systems.

Since Pulse is an extension of Tally, all financial record keeping of the distributorship, like books of accounts, receivables and payables, budgeting, statutory compliances are part of the solution which has gained favour from the distributors.

Other key functionalities like purchase order automation, distributor claims and settlements, distributors sales and financial accounting, and channel performance monitoring are incorporated into Pulse.

By design, Pulse has the ability to operate in an offline mode as well. At many locations, distributors do not have assured Internet connectivity and hence, a unique feature that has been incorporated is that, the Tally add-on actively monitors for an Internet connection and then starts the update process in the background.

Due to the initial efforts in understanding stakeholder expectations, the roll-out was as fast as two months for the GSM products.

The Implementation

Pulse has brought in complete visibility and control into the supply chain and made data driven decision making a lot easier.”

Shirish Munj, Head - IT, Tata Teleservices Ltd .

Since the crux of this project is the sales information that gets collected from the distributors, understanding their expectations was paramount.

Tata Tele conducted a series of workshops with distributors from various corners of India to understand how they perceive a solution like Pulse and their willingness to work with it.

Tata Tele spent significant efforts to identify existing commercial solutions to meet the distributors’ expectations (which was primarily a single-application and one-time data entry).

When no ready-to-deploy tools met this criterion, TCS decided to take the bull by its horns – they built this ability into Tally itself.The roll-out was fast paced with a two-month window between

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

Project Overview Tata Tele Distributors

Retailers Consumers

A customized version of Tally is deployed at the distributor end, which reads the sales data of TataTele’s products, assimilates it, and sends the same to the company’s ERP. Since Tally is the de-facto accounting package at the distributors, they do not have to re-enter data. The update happens in the background without interrupting work.

Tata Tele uses this data for analytics - to gain visility into product uptakes at different locations.

concept and go-live (for the GSM products). TCS and Tata Tele achieved this mainly due to the initial efforts put in to understand the requirements from the end users (the distributors). A solution hot house was built, involving business stake holders and distributors to get a signoff on the solution - this ensured that there was no gap between expectation and delivery. The overseeing committee consisting of a cross functional team from Tally, TCS and Tata Tele constantly reviewed the development and monitored deviations.

The Tally Integration Tally is a desktop standalone solution with its native database, and hence, integrating it with the Oracle based backend system of Tata Tele was a technical challenge. Making matters more complicated was the fact that the data exchange is in terms of lakhs of transactions per day. A service oriented architecture was developed to ensure that data transfer happens smoothly with a error handling mechanism.

Data synchronization between the Tally front end and the centralized backend system can happen either online or offline (as the system waits for an available Internet connection). To ensure data integrity, a robust mechanism was created to handle failure and ensure that every single transaction is being sent, received , acknowledged and corrected if necessary. The result of the SOA and data synchronization approach is evident

today with no significant integration issues or data mismatch having cropped up till date.

The Benefits The most obvious business benefit that Pulse has brought in is that Tata Tele has not lost a single customer due to lack of stock at retailers or distributors. The efficiency of tracking products across the supply chain is now 100 percent. The time delay in knowing the stock position is now near real-time, from an earlier time window of three days.

The success of this project is also due to its simplicity. Even a small distributor or a small business can be connected without a full fledged IT infrastructure. An instance of Tally and an Internet connection are all that is required.

Utilizing the reach of the Tally ecosystem, which in this context is analogous to the last mile, TCS has ensured that there are no hurdles to distributors utilizing this solution..

Though Pulse is developed to meet the telco’s channel management activities, it is flexible enough to be customizable for use by organizations in any domain that use a distributor set up. The project was launched as a strategic long term solution. Tata Tele and TCS are already working on taking it to the next level.

Integration with hand held devices like PDAs is in the pipeline, which will enable sales persons to input and retrieve data on the move.

TRANSFORMERS INTERVIEW CASE STUDY

Technology Can

De-commoditize Indian Telecom Ravi throws light on the challenges that telecom operators face, and what they can do about it.

“Technology is common across all operators.

IT’s ability to enable an operator as a provider

of unique set of services will make the key difference”, he says.

Ravi Viswanathan

Head, Telecom Services Business, TCS

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

Given the humongous growth of the telecom sector in India, operators’ problems are not usually spoken of.

What according to you are the biggest technology challenges that telcos face today?

getting a new set of tyres for a car and changing them as it is running. This is where the expertise of seasoned providers such as ourselves comes in.

Sure, the Indian telecom industry has seen extremely strong growth, and the supporting technology has been evolving alongside. As an industry, telecom players make one of the largest investments in technology. The exploding subscriber base has driven almost all telcos to constantly add hardware. Interestingly, all players make more or less the same kind of spends. While monetizing the investments on spectrum and networks is a challenge, the bigger challenge however, is the falling Revenue per User (RPU). Operators have revenueless consumers and increase in traffic. Introduction of number portability will certainly churn the market. The increase in mobile traffic has brought in a two fold challenge. While technology availability is no issue, acquiring it is Capex intensive. The upgrade is a business imperative – like upgrading the wireless network. Then there’s the challenge of marrying the legacy and cutting edge infrastructure. These have led to a less than optimal management of the growing customer base and the consequent inability to scale revenue on par with this growth.

With the arrival of 3G, we are at a turning point in the Indian telecom space. What trends do you see in the future?

What role can IT play in helping Indian telecom companies overcome these challenges?

The ability of an operator to invest in upgrading the physical infrastructure is no longer a key business factor. Today, an operator can run his business without having his own network. With telecom services almost becoming a commodity, the operators have to look for ways of creating differentiators – to de-commoditize the offering. Deployment of solutions such as service and content delivery platforms, device management solutions and predictive churn modelling can enable additional streams of revenue by attracting and retaining customers.

Telcos have come to realize that the customer is the most important aspect of their service. Earlier, their focus was on billing, then the importance shifted to the networks and now it is on the end user. Telcos have to gain deeper understanding of customer behavior, identify and analyze the tariff plans that bring in the most revenue, or have the maximum number of problems. By analyzing these trends, they can gauge what works for them and what doesn’t, and do more of the right and less of the wrong. Technology helps an operator segment his customers and differentiate the offerings in terms of better call quality and improving the customers’ perception of their service. By taking proactive measures, understanding customers and their calling pattern, analyzing call drops and other network related issues, telcos can improve customer loyalty and be seen as a unique player in the market, as against just a supplier of a commodity.

How can telcos address the issues of keeping pace with the rapidly changing technologies?

The key for any operator is to quickly integrate new technology and to resume business as usual, making the new additions look transparent to the existing applications. It is akin to

Earlier, the focus was on creating products and packaging them with hundreds of tariff schemes. Today, given the current price structure, these have become less relevant. What becomes more critical is the content, and the quality of the product offered. For instance, with the move towards 3G, while the technology is going to be the same, the differentiator will be in the form of its application, such as video calling or video downloads.

Managing the content delivery platforms to deliver segmented applications and integrating them in different delivery channels such as television, mobile phones, desktop, landline or a combination of these will come in the next wave of convergence. Needless to say, technology will enable all of this – backend applications should be able to support these functions seamlessly and provide the ability to manage, bill, and create a revenue scheme.

What opportunities lie in waiting for telecom operators in the near future?

The demands of tomorrow’s digital generation are far more than what any of us can perceive. They don’t look at the phone as just a voice communication tool. Therein lies the opportunity for operators who can understand the market or create new market segments. Telcos should try new business models such as delivering content to students by associating with educational institutes, or deliver media by partnering with a media house. Enterprise applications are also leading to enhanced efficiency, they should be able to disrupt existing business models and create new opportunities. Of course, there will be followers, but the key is who is going to make these quantum leaps. The trends indicate that the user profiles are changing, and the ability for us to manage this shift more effectively is going to be extremely important.

What is the USP in TCS’ offerings for the telecom sector in terms of services?

It is vital for a telecom operator to partner with a service provider who understands the industry and has the ability to respond to changing market dynamics. We work with almost every leading technology provider in the market which allows us to understand technologies better and draw a roadmap for our telecom customers.

Transformers is brought to you by IDG Custom Solutions Group in association with

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is among the most trusted solution providers to the Communications Industry today. Our Consultants deliver solutions that help clients boost their revenues, besides optimising processes and maximising their technology investments. A rich experience within various industry enables us to offer end-to-end solutions - right from product engineering and consulting to application development and system integration. Some of the largest Telecom companies, across the globe, have experienced the certainty of our solutions. With dedicated offshore centers for several of our esteemed clients, we work closely with them to provide high-quality, on-time and cost-effective solutions.