InformationWeek India October 2012 Issue by Viraj Mehta

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Focus shifts to growth and transformation s keen observers of the business technology landscape in India, we at InformationWeek have seen how the role of IT continues to evolve every year, and how expectations have changed. Today, IT has a critical role in terms of not only managing growth, but also in innovating to deliver new products and in creating new markets. The focus today is less on ‘run’ but more on ‘grow’ and ‘transform’ the business. We have seen this trait emerging strongly among the list of entries received for EDGE — our annual initiative to identify, recognize and honor end-user companies in India that have demonstrated the best use of technology to solve a business problem and improve business competitiveness. For us at InformationWeek, it is a privilege to present and honor some of the most interesting technology deployments that have a great impact on business. This special issue of EDGE contains several such examples. While some companies have created new markets by using limited resources, others have boosted profit margins by using technology innovatively. Several other companies are using technologies in the mobile and social space to better connect with their customers and improve business visibility. We also have a few examples of IT innovations where the deployments have the potential of creating a huge ‘catalyst’ effect and spurring other organizations into action. Take the case of the State Election Commission in Gujarat, which has developed an ‘Online Voting System’. The results, though limited in scope, highlight how technology can be used to transform governance. We believe that the ‘EDGE’ issue in a way is a microcosm of enterprise Indian IT adoption, as it showcases how enterprise IT adoption in India has truly evolved, and how India’s business technology leaders are finally influencing business strategy by changing their roles from being a ‘supporter’ of the business to a ‘leader’ of the business. Finally, do not miss the section on the Future Strategist Award winners — our initiative to identify the next CIO-in-the-making. These leaders deserve special recognition for the way they have used technology intelligently to maximize business impact for their organizations. We humbly hope that this special issue will serve as a useful business technology navigator in encouraging and inspiring your organization to fully realize the transformational capabilities of IT.

This issue is a microcosm of enterprise Indian IT adoption, as it showcases how enterprise IT adoption in India has truly evolved, and how India’s business technology leaders are finally influencing business strategy

u Srikanth RP is Executive Editor, InformationWeek

informationweek october 2012

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contents Volume 1 | Issue 12 |

October 2012

Cover Design : Deepjyoti Bhowmik

future strategist award Munish Mittal, Sr. Executive Vice President – IT, HDFC Bank

Gaurang V Doshi, Associate Vice President AEGIS – IT Infrastructure Project Group, Essar Group

C O Parmar, Dy General Manager (Systems), Kandla Unit, IFFCO

Dinesh Chandra Gupta, DGM - IT, Godrej Consumer Products

Raghubir Singh, General Manager - IT, Usha International Limited

diamond edge Essar Group

MTS India

State Election Commission, Gujarat

Sesa Goa

YES BANK

silver edge Atul Limited BSES Reliance ADA Group Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company Essar Steel India Limited IFFCO TOKIO General Insurance Company Indian Oil Corporation Infosys Larsen & Toubro Infotech Mahindra Real Estate Marico Max Healthcare Institute Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals State Bank of India Sheela Foam TVS Motors

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

watch the awards ceremony of FSa, EDGE and Global CIO at: www.interop.in 8

informationweek october 2012

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BI/Analytics Axis Asset Management Company 48 Biostadt 48 Infosys 48 Cairn India 49 Essar Projects 49 Idea Cellular 49 Indiabulls Technology Solutions 50 Kotak Mahindra Bank 50 Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (Automotive & Farm Sectors) 50 Marico 51 Max Bupa Health Insurance 51 Pan India Food Solutions 51 Infosys 52 Usha International 52 YES BANK 52 Enterprise Applications Bharat Forge (Kalyani Group of Companies) 54 Chettinad Cements 54 Clinigene International 54 Drive India Enterprise Solutions Ltd. (DIESL) 55 DSP BlackRock Investment Managers 55 Essar Group 55 Godrej Industries 56 HDFC Standard Life Insurance 56 Hinduja Hospital 56 Hitachi Consulting Software Services India 57 HRH Group of Hotels 57 Eaton Corporation 57 Infosys 58 K Raheja Corp 58 Reliance Power 58 RJ Corp 59 59 Drive India Enterprise Solutions Ltd. (DIESL) Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) 59 Sistema Shyam Teleservices, (MTS India) 60 SIVA Shipping 60 Sterling Metaplast India 60 61 Sudarshan Chemical Industries Tata AIG General Insurance 61 Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL 61 Welspun Group 62 Wipro Technologies 62 62 Mahindra Lifespace Developers TVS Dynamic Global Freight Services 63 Wockhardt 63 Infosys 63 Security 64 Cairn Energy India iGATE 64 Mahindra and Mahindra Financial Services Limited (MMFSL) 64 Landmark Group 65 65 Manappuram Finance Nucleus Software Exports Limited 65 Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd 66 RSWM 66 State Bank of India (SBI) 66 Siva Industries & Holdings 67 Tata Steel 67 Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) 67 Social L&T Infotech Mahindra Lifespace Developers Royal Orchid Hotels Sanofi India Limited

70 70 71 71

Mobility Essar Group Future Group Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Service Lintas India ICICI Securities Mahindra & Mahindra

72 72 72 73 73 73

Cloud Computing Centre for Sight Essar Group Forbes Marshall Group of Companies Godrej Industries

74 74 75 75

Virtualization 76 Bharat Petroleum Corporation Biocon 76 Hitachi Consulting Software Services India 76 Essar Group 77

Evalueserve 77 Shoppers Stop 77 Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) 78 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research 78 Hitachi Consulting Software Services India 78 General IT Aviva Life India 80 Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) 80 Chhattisgarh Infotech & Biotech Promotion Society (CHiPS) 81 DDB Mudra Group 81 Eaton Corporation 82 East India Hotels (EIH) 82 Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers 82 Globus Stores 83 State Election Commission, Govt. of Maharashtra 83 HDFC Securities 83 ICICI Securities 84 iGATE 84 K Raheja Corporate Services 84 Eaton Corporation 85 Dr Babasaheb Amedkar Open University 85 Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services 85 GE Shipping 86 Max Bupa Health Insurance Company 86 Nanavati Hospital 86 Principal Retirement Advisors 87 State Bank of India 87 Luminous Power Technologies 87 Shoppers Stop 88 Syntel 88 Mahindra & Mahindra 88 Transport Corporation of India 89 Wipro e Peripherals (WeP) 89 90 Eaton Corporation K Raheja Corporate Services 90 Mahindra Satyam 90 STORAGE/DCP/BR Infosys 92 Cairn India 92 DSP BlackRock Investment Managers 93 Essar Group 93 Hitachi Consulting Software Services India 93 IDFC 94 Aegis 94 Marico 94 Premier India 95 Volkswagen India 95 95 Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Data Center/ Networking 96 Essar Group Indian Oil Corporation 96 96 Jindal Steel and Power (Angul, Odisha) K Raheja Corporate Services 97 KPIT Cummins Info Systems 97 VFS Global Group 97 Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers 98 98 Indian Oil Corporation Mindlance 98 Unified Communications/Videoconferencing/ Enterprise Communications 99 Allergan India 99 Essar Group Eaton Corporation 100 Essar Group 100 Mindlance 100 Marico 101 101 Wipro Technologies Essar Group 101 Document Management/MPS Cairn India SBI Funds Management JCT Limited Lintas India Private Limited Globus Stores

102 102 103 103 103

Open Source Delhi State Cancer Institute Eaton Corporation Reliance Communications

104 104 104

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 9

Imprint

VOLUME 1 No. 12 n October 2012

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Managing Director : Sanjeev Khaira Printer & Publisher : Kailash Pandurang Shirodkar Associate Publisher & Director : Anees Ahmed : Brian Pereira Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor : Srikanth RP Principal Correspondent : Jasmine Kohli Principal Correspondent : Ayushman Baruah (Bengaluru) Senior Correspondent : Amrita Premrajan (New Delhi) : Shweta Nanda Copy Editor Design Art Director : Deepjyoti Bhowmik Senior Visualiser : Yogesh Naik Senior Graphic Designer : Shailesh Vaidya Graphic Designer : Jinal Chheda Designer : Sameer Surve Marketing Deputy Manager : Sanket Karode Deputy ManagerManagement Service : Jagruti Kudalkar online Manager—Product Dev. & Mktg. : Viraj Mehta : Nilesh Mungekar Deputy Manager—Online : Nitin Lahare Web Designer Sr. User Interface Designer : Aditi Kanade Operations Head—Finance : Yogesh Mudras Director—Operations & : Satyendra Mehra Administration Sales Mumbai : Marvin Dalmeida Manager- Sales marvin.dalmeida@ubm.com (M) +91 8898022365 Bengaluru : Kangkan Mahanta Manager—Sales kangkan.mahanta@ubm.com (M) +91 89712 32344 Delhi : Rajeev Chauhan Manager—Sales rajeev.chauhan@ubm.com (M) +91 98118 20301

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Munish Mittal

Sr. Executive Vice President – IT, HDFC Bank

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RNI NO. MAH ENG/2011/39874

Gaurang V Doshi

Associate Vice President - AEGIS – IT Infrastructure Project Group, Essar Group

C O Parmar

Dy General Manager (Systems), Kandla Unit, IFFCO

Dinesh Chandra Gupta

DGM - IT, Godrej Consumer Products

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Company name Page No. Microsoft APC IBM Eaton Open Text Checkpoint Zoho eScan IFSEC Interop Virtual Ctrl S Juniper

Website Sales Contact

01 & 02 www.windowsserver2012.in microsoft.in/readynow 4 www.SEreply.com esupport@apc.com 5 www.ibm.com ibm.com/integratedsystems/in 7 www.eaton.com/powerquality/india EatonPowerQualityIndia@eaton.com 11 www.opentext.com marketing.asia@opentext.com 17 www.checkpoint.com indiasales@checkpoint.com 23 www.zoho.com india-sales@ManageEngien.com 31 www.escanav.com enterprise@escanav.com 53 www.ifsecsouthindia.com pankaj.jain@ubm.com 68 & 69 www.interop.in salil.warior@ubm.com 79 www.interop.in salil.warior@ubm.com 105 www.ctrls.in/mumbai-data-center marketing@ctrls.in 106 www.juniper@dnbindia.in Priya Sharma

Raghubir Singh

General Manager - IT, Usha International Limited

Important Every effort has been taken to avoid errors or omissions in this magazine. In spite of this, errors may creep in. Any mistake, error or discrepancy noted may be brought to our notice immediately. It is notified that neither the publisher, the editor or the seller will be responsible in respect of anything and the consequence of anything done or omitted to be done by any person in reliance upon the content herein. This disclaimer applies to all, whether subscriber to the magazine or not. For binding mistakes, misprints, missing pages, etc., the publisher’s liability is limited to replacement within one month of purchase. © All rights are reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Mumbai only. Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. UBM India Pvt Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever.

informationweek october 2012

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News Storage

Intel chips in to tap the power of Big Data Intel is aiming at playing a pivotal role in harnessing the power of Big Data. Big Data, characterized by larger volumes, higher velocity, and greater variety refers to the real-time analysis of massive amounts of distributed and mainly unstructured multi-format data. Billions of connected devices ranging from PCs and smartphones to sensor devices such as RFID readers and traffic cams generate this flood of complex data. By 2012, the digital universe of data is set to grow to 2.72 zettabytes (ZB) and double every two years to reach 8 ZB by 2015. Intel plans to accelerate Big Data analytics through faster and more effective CPU, storage, I/O, and network platform. It attempts to drive innovation in Big Data applications by providing optimized software stack and services. The company is also keen to collaborate with partners and invest in solution research and services for Big Data. “Intel’s open platforms, open software, open standards approach and industry leadership will drive down the cost and drive up the pace of innovation, putting affordable Big Data analytical capabilities within everyone’s reach,” said Nick Knupffer, Marketing Director - PRC & APAC, DCSG, Intel at the Cloud Summit 2012 held in Bangkok. While most of the momentum around Big Data today is around social media sources, Intel believes that realizing the promise of Big Data analytics must include a way to harness

the potential of Big Data from intelligent systems and sensors. According to Intel, organizations that want to take advantage of edge data (data at the edge of networks) must understand how existing disparate data sources can be evolved into a network of integrated, intelligent, connected systems. The company also feels it’s important for organizations to address issues related to data ownership, interoperability, security, and privacy to exploit the true power of Big Data. Intel believes it is well positioned to lead the Big Data space with its long experience in providing the technology that powers intelligent systems, as well as platforms that deliver high performance, low latency, and high throughput needed to handle large data sets and transform them into deep insights. As part of the Summit, Intel also reiterated its cloud vision for 2015 which is a federated, automated and client-aware cloud environment. “Cloud should be federated so that we are able to share data securely across private and public clouds; automated so that IT can focus more on innovation and less on management; and client-aware so that services can be optimized based on device capability,” said Jason Fedder, APAC & PRC General Manager, Datacenter, Intel. — Ayushman Baruah (The writer was hosted by Intel in Bangkok)

S o f t wa r e

Infosys strengthens consulting capabilities by buying Lodestone Infosys announced a definitive agreement to acquire Lodestone Holding, a leading global management consultancy firm for an aggregate enterprise value of CHF 330 million in cash. Headquartered in Zurich, Lodestone advises international companies on strategy and process optimization, and provides business transformation solutions enabled by SAP. Upon completion, the acquisition of Lodestone will strengthen Infosys Consulting and Systems Integration (C&SI) capabilities, by bringing more than 850 employees, including 750 experienced SAP consultants to the company. Lodestone will add more than 200 clients across industries including manufacturing, automotive

informationweek october 2012

and life sciences, to the Infosys pool of over 700 clients. Post acquisition, the combined consulting practice focusing on SAP programs will deliver revenues of more than USD 1 billion. Infosys Consulting & Systems Integration business, today, has more than 30,000 consultants across 10 industry verticals and accounts for 31 percent of the company’s revenue. The Lodestone acquisition will significantly enhance its global presence. SD Shibulal, CEO & Managing Director, Infosys said, “A key plank of our Infosys 3.0 strategy is to expand our consulting & systems integration business. This acquisition fits perfectly into that strategy.” —InformationWeek News Network

Corrigendum In the issue dated September 2012 (Global CIO) the following facts were incorrectly mentioned: l Akhilesh Tuteja’s designation on page 22 should correctly read: “Head of IT Advisory and Partner, KPMG in India”. l

In Rajesh Uppal’s profile on page 28, within the Career Track box, his additional responsibility should be read as: “Beyond IT, he also headed the sales and dispatch function”.

In Shailesh Joshi’s profile on page 30 it was erroneously mentioned that Godrej Properties was the pioneer in Real estate for SAP, for which it has won a SAP Ace award. The award was won in his previous organization, K Raheja Corp and not Godrej Properties.

We deeply regret the inconvenience caused to those concerned.

www.informationweek.in

Munish Mittal

Sr. Executive Vice President – IT, HDFC Bank

Gaurang V Doshi

Associate Vice President - AEGIS – IT Infrastructure Project Group, Essar Group

C O Parmar

Dy General Manager (Systems), Kandla Unit, IFFCO

Dinesh Chandra Gupta DGM - IT, Godrej Consumer Products

Raghubir Singh

General Manager - IT, Usha International Limited

watch the awards ceremony at: www.interop.in

october 2012 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 13

future strategist award

Tomorrow’s CIOs are today’s IT leaders InformationWeek picked five IT pros who are most likely to assume the CIO/ CTO role in future. We are presenting them the Future Strategist Award 2012 in recognition for their achievements and skills By Team InformationWeek

omorrow’s CIOs are leading teams and projects today. They work against tight deadlines and toil to meet the business expectations. They report to a CIO, CTO or the equivalent, who moulds them for the role of IT head. In the capacity of delivery heads, they have project managers reporting to them. And they lead teams of people, often overseeing multiple projects that run concurrently. They also interact with vendors and heads of business units to address their specific requirements. And they have to manage change internally, often with stiff resistance from users. We call this level of leaders Future Strategists. We at InformationWeek realize that some of the best ideas and innovation come from Future Strategists. So we would like to recognize these leaders and acknowledge their significant contributions to their respective organizations. In 2010, we created the Future Strategist Award (FSA), which is now an annual exercise that begins with an open self-nomination process. This year we received 40 nominations and after the first round of validation, we shortlisted this down to 34. As we mentioned in the

Prasad Patil Associate Vice-President, AEGIS – IT Infrastructure Project Group

A unique aspect of the Future Strategist Award is that it is amongst the few awards today that gives a chance to the middle management and next-generation IT fraternity to showcase their skills and achievements at such a wellknown and respected forum nomination form, only IT executives who directly report to CIOs, CTOs or IT Heads are eligible for this award. We have a separate award for CIOs called Global CIO (refer to our September 2012 issue). The jury of InformationWeek editors went through all the validated nominations and shortlisted again to 15. The jury shortlisted entries that clearly showed the contribution to business — how did the business benefit after the project, in terms of production output/yield, efficiency, cost savings and revenue. For instance, one of our 2012 Future Strategists did projects that boosted production capacities by more than 200 percent.

Seema Gaur Deputy General Manager (Systems), IFFCO

This award has boosted my self-confidence in shaping and grooming myself as a future CIO of the company. Also, this has added credibility to my role within the organization; especially amongst the non-IT fraternity of the company

informationweek october 2012

Points were awarded for experience and track record, scale of the project, business impact (in terms of benefit/ ROI), innovation, skills, project execution, and delivery. The jury looked for skills like ability to handle multiple projects and business acumen. And it looked for consistency in performance over a long term. When we compared all the score sheets at the end of this exercise, we could see some close scores — in some cases a difference of a few points. Since there are just five awards, the jury was careful not to be biased, or to select two people from the same organization. The end result was five winners, who we feel are most suited for IT leadership. These were the five with the highest scores. And that certainly does not mean that the ones who did not win, are incapable of leadership — in fact, they are eligible to apply next year. Congratulations to the winners! InformationWeek shall be presenting these awards at a ceremony at INTEROP Mumbai on October 10.

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future strategist award

The leader with a habit of winning

credit should be given where it is due. These are the values he passes on to his team. “The essential qualities for good leadership are taking responsibility, managing the situation, work, responsibilities, organizational priorities and team members,” says Munish. He further adds that equally important are aspects such as identifying/spotting talent, organizing work, and deputing the right people for the right roles. But leaders also spend time nurturing talent, and give wings to innovators and creative minds. Proactive and frequent communication is essential for leadership. His biggest challenge is ensuring 100 percent systems availability and uptime. To ensure this, Munish deployed a talented, skilled and focused incident, availability, capacity and performance management team.

ith over 25 years of IT experience in the banking industry, Munish Mittal has been associated with the IT management of HDFC Bank for over 16 years. As Senior Executive Vice President–IT at HDFC Bank, he is responsible for the systems management of the Bank. Munish is a key stakeholder and contributor to the Bank’s IT strategy and information Architecture. Munish also drives the IT strategy of HDFC Securities, an associate company of HDFC Bank. He is a core member of the Bank’s IT Architecture Board, which requires him to formulate and decide the core technology architecture. He also champions key IT policy formulation, and coaches the IT governance team. Munish reports to Anil Jaggia, CIO & Group Head – Admin, Premises, Service Quality, Financial Inclusion Business, Legal & Secretarial.

PROJECTS

Since he joined the HDFC Bank in August 1996, Munish implemented numerous strategic technology initiatives, including engineered systems; SoA (service oriented architecture); Business Intelligence, data warehousing & CRM solutions; mobile banking and mobile trading; automation of credit underwriting

LEADERSHIP QUOTIENT

Munish Mittal has over 25 years of IT experience in the banking industry and has been associated with the IT management of HDFC Bank for over 16 years. At HDFC Bank, Munish is responsible for the systems management of the Bank. In his current role, he also drives the IT strategy for HDFC Securities, an associate company of HDFC Bank.

Career Achievement

Track Record

Munish believes the quality that makes him outstanding is strong technology acumen supplemented with faster decision-making. But he also considers himself to be a strategic thinker and a keen learner. Inquisitiveness and the winning habit are his core strengths. And he believes

Munish has implemented numerous strategic technology initiatives for mobile banking and trading; automation of credit underwriting and loan origination business processes; Basel II technology solution; disaster recovery management; and core banking infrastructure upgrades. He has also achieved automation of direct banking channels.

Munish Mittal

Sr. Executive Vice President – IT, HDFC Bank

and loan origination business processes; Basel II technology solution; disaster recovery management; core banking infrastructure upgrades; payment systems including merchant acquiring; and debit card issuing solutions. He also spearheaded the automation of direct banking channels, including ATM, PoS and call center solutions; financial accounting; and human capital management. Munish began his career as a banking domain software programmer in a PSIDC Subsidiary company named Electronic Systems Punjab Ltd. (ESPL), back in November of 1987 in Mohali, Chandigarh. Academically, he is a Science graduate with a Masters in Business Administration. In his previous career assignments from 1987 through 1996, Munish has worked with the Bank Of Punjab Limited, Datapro Franchisee, Electronic Systems Punjab Limited, and JCT Electronics.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 15

future strategist award

The bold, high-energy leader

enterprise implementation development design, and towards team building and leadership skills. They note his key attributes like strong domain expertise, interpersonal skills, and a fun-to-workwith attitude. His enriched capability of a cohesive employee environment results in zero percent attrition in his team. Gaurang says that leaders should be able to communicate their vision in such a way that their followers would immediately accept it. Leaders must communicate clearly and passionately, since passion is contagious. He believes that a good leader must also have the discipline to work toward his or her vision singlemindedly, as well as to direct his/ her actions, and those of the team, towards the goal. For Gaurang, action is the mark of a leader.

aurang Doshi has more than13 years of leadership experience in implementing IT solutions for enhancing productivity. For the past 10 years, he has been helping the Essar Group achieve a sustainable competitive edge over its competitors. He is currently working in the capacity of Delivery Head – Systems under various practices. His responsibilities include managing a cross-locational and diverse workforce of more than 100 people. He is responsible for all the systems-related project deliverables, and for deploying best-in-class processes and teams for the same. He has profound expertise in the field of storage technology. Under his leadership, his team realized several domestic and international systems and storage projects for the Essar Group. He collaborates with the CIO of Essar Steel India, and directly reports to Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group.

PROJECTS

Gaurang has been leading systemsrelated projects at the Essar Group, where he takes care of the end-to-end deliverables, right from POC (proof of concept) to closure. His KRA is to ensure timely delivery of projects within stipulated budgets and also to safeguard CSAT results.

LEADERSHIP QUOTIENT

With over 13 years of leadership experience in implementing IT solutions for enhancing productivity, Gaurang Doshi is helping the Essar Group achieve a sustainable competitive edge over its competitors. He is currently working in the capacity of Delivery Head – Systems under various practices. He manages a crosslocational and diverse 100 plus workforce.

informationweek october 2012

Career Achievement

Track Record

Friends and peers think Gaurang is a bold, analytical thinker, and a high-energy leader with the ability to influence decisions — and gain the trust of peers, clients and management teams. He is eager to contribute towards advanced

Under his leadership, his team realized several domestic and international systems and storage projects for the Essar Group. In earlier stints, Gaurang served as Delivery Head for Systems vertical, Engagement Manager for the steel business, and also a procurement specialist for the Group.

Gaurang V Doshi

Associate Vice President - AEGIS – IT Infrastructure Project Group, Essar Group

Some of the major projects that Gaurang managed this year are: l Citrix desktop virtualization l Microsoft private cloud implementation l Lync 2010 rollout l Server virtualization across four data centers l Afaria implementation l E-mail consolidation on Exchange 2010 centralized platform for approximately 20,000 users. There have been many challenges in each project, the common one being managing user resistance in enterprise systems implementation. This affects the productivity and the quality of service. Resistance results from the gap between change initiators and employees, who try to maintain their status quo with undesirable behaviors toward change. To counter this challenge, he makes users understand that the new process is beneficial not only for the company, but also in making them (users) more efficient. He also selects a coordinator from the user community, as this is an effective way to reduce user resistance.

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future strategist award

A self-made IT veteran

ith more than three decades (31 years) of IT experience, serving 28 years in his current organization, C O Parmar is undoubtedly a veteran. At IFFCO, the world’s largest fertilizer manufacturing and marketing organization, he leads the IT Department at one of the five manufacturing plants of IFFCO at Kandla. Parmar is a self-made man, who has worked at various levels and capacities, with roles ranging from Systems Analyst to the current level of DGM. He began his career with Tata Chemicals, the largest manufacturer of soda ash in India. He has diverse experience in IT ranging from project management, application rollouts, hardware and software infrastructure. Topping his long list of responsibilities are IT hardware and software infrastructure setup and ensuring round-the-clock uptime/ availability. He is also responsible for the development/implementation and maintenance of business applications in all the functional areas — finance, materials, HR, production, maintenance and technical. Parmar reports to S C Mittal, who is Senior Executive Director (MS & IT) cum Group CTO.

Excellence in strategic thinking and initiatives enabled Parmar to complete many projects during his three-decade long career. In his work, you see a person that’s committed and devoted to his organization, and who gets involved in all the activities. He’s committed to high standards, and aspires for excellence. He embraces new challenges and strives to honor deadlines. And there’s an ever-positive attitude. His numerous projects and the accolades he’s won are testimony to these leadership qualities. The qualities that Parmar believes are essential for good leadership include ambition, strategic thinking, can-do attitude, embracing challenges, dedication, enthusiasm, confidence, teamwork, leading by example, passion and problem solving, and high standards and excellence.

PROJECTS

Parmar led numerous projects related to business application development and implementation. To his credit are the LAN setup way back in 1999, which was based on multi-mode fiber cables with central and departmental switches using MM fiber modules. The LAN established connectivity between the plant and the township, which is 20 kilometers away. Before that,

C O Parmar has 31 years of IT experience, serving 28 years in his current organization. At IFFCO he leads the IT department at one of the five manufacturing plants of IFFCO at Kandla. He is responsible for all aspects of IT hardware and software infrastructure at the Kandla Unit. This includes the development/ implementation and maintenance of business applications.

informationweek october 2012

Career Achievement

Track Record

LEADERSHIP QUOTIENT

During his long stint at IFFCO, Parmar has undertaken several projects. But the most notable ones are the LAN setup in 1999 and 2009, which established connectivity between the plant and township. Another notable project to his credit is the data center renovation. This enabled all servers and networks to be operational round-the-clock.

C O Parmar

Dy General Manager (Systems), Kandla Unit, IFFCO

executives had to travel to the plant for any IT-related task. Another notable project to his credit is the data center renovation. This enabled all servers and networks to be operational round-the-clock. Then there were thin client server-based computing systems and energy saving initiatives. This unique virtualization system, where 15 types of desktop applications run from central servers, reduced the cost of maintenance and total control by the IT team. Other notable projects to his credit are Online Veritas Backup System, computerized attendance recording system, Rehabilitation work (for IT equipment) during a massive earthquake in 2001, and the implementation of global business applications. All these projects contributed significantly to the business. Even though the production capacities more than doubled, the automation resulted in immense productivity and efficiency of manpower, thereby leading the business to more profitability every year.

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A team builder who focuses on business Gupta reports to Shailesh Joshi, CIO, Godrej Industries.

Dinesh Chandra Gupta has logged 17 years in the field of Information Technology, and has been serving Godrej Consumer Industries for the past 7 years. He is responsible for the complete infrastructure and projects that include strategic and project planning for its business requirements. He oversees all IT-related purchasing and budget usage, and works with the Finance Department to develop budgets.

Apart from his vast experience in the IT sector, Gupta also won various awards. He won the InformationWeek Silver EDGE Award in 2009 for replacing the legacy Wi-Fi network with a centralized wireless network. Last year, he won the EDGE award for best technology advancement in infrastructure consolidation.

Dinesh Chandra Gupta

DGM - IT, Godrej Consumer Products

LEADERSHIP QUOTIENT

According to peers, Gupta has great team building skills. He focuses on business and explores new technologies to cut cost, and leverages IT to improve business productivity. Gupta believes all great leaders are defined by their character in terms of how well they uphold their values, such as integrity. He says good leaders create dreams that galvanize people into action. Real leaders subjugate their personal desires to a compelling vision or higher purpose with the aim of making a difference. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Leaders commit totally to their causes. Total commitment means they must persevere despite the sometimes overwhelming odds against them. Three necessary ingredients for preservation are forbearance, self-discipline, and courage,â&#x20AC;? says Gupta. He further says that leaders strive for excellence in their quest for mastery. As they let go of the perception of fear, they achieve confidence. Leaders have a deep sense of satisfaction about what they have done to make a difference in

Career Achievement

Track Record

or Dinesh Chandra Gupta, the journey began in the year 1994, with his first job as Information Systems Officer at the Hyatt Regency, Asian Hotels in New Delhi. Later he served as Deputy Manager Systems for Balmer Lawrie & Co, Mumbai. He has been with Godrej Consumer Products since 2005 and has logged 17 years in the field of Information Technology. At Godrej Consumer Products, he is responsible for the complete infrastructure and projects, which include strategic planning and project planning for its business requirements. He oversees all IT-related purchasing and budget usage, and works with the Finance Department to develop budgets. He manages a team of six, and currently handles the India and Argentina business. Some of the bigger challenges he faces are increased costs, increased risk and decreased agility. He believes that organizations have realized that it is expensive to maintain disparate systems with multiple standards, each requiring a specialized skill set. This leads to increase in maintenance and integration costs, and such a situation is best avoided, even if it means an increase in costs.

the world. They gain satisfaction in knowing that when their best was called upon, they delivered.

PROJECTS

Notable among his many projects are: l IT infrastructure outsourcing l MPLS connectivity spanning 150+ locations for the Godrej Group l Infrastructure optimization for supporting six countries for Godrej Consumer Products business He was instrumental in outsourcing the complete infrastructure outsourcing to HP for a 10-year contract period, with the objective of large service windows, better SLA, improved processes, vendor consolidation and minimizing IT risk. MPLS connectivity provided 45 percent of infrastructure cost reduction, with zero business impact infrastructure optimization. It improved service levels for global users at all times, and reduced operational overheads and the risks associated with managing business-critical data.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 19

future strategist award

The technologist who mastered business

Being a widespread organizational sales force team, the challenges posed to IT were not only from the technical side, but also from the operational side. Singh’s mentor, Subodh Dubey, the Group CIO, has endorsed his technical knowledge and his capabilities to work with business. He has acknowledged Singh’s understanding of specific requirements.

Raghubir Singh has over 20 years of IT experience, including five years at Usha International. He has a successful track record of helping organizations leverage IT for business. His contribution to business transformation has resulted in improved productivity, efficiency, and cost savings. His projects have been widely recognized through numerous awards won for himself and his organization.

informationweek october 2012

Raghubir Singh

General Manager - IT, Usha International Limited

LEADERSHIP QUOTIENT

Singh’s mantra for leadership is about being able to take on new technological initiatives to support the business, and to support running systems. He believes leadership is one’s ability to get others to willingly follow. He says a leader with vision has a clear, vivid picture of where he’s going, and a firm grasp on what success looks like — and how to achieve it. But it’s not enough to have a vision; a leader must be able to communicate his or her vision in terms that cause followers to buy it. Singh believes that a leader must have the discipline to work toward his/her vision single-mindedly, as well as to direct his/her actions and those of the team toward the goal. Action is the mark of a leader who does not suffer ‘analysis paralysis’ but is always doing something in pursuit of the

Career Achievement

Track Record

ith over 20 years of IT experience, Raghubir Singh has served leading organizations like Bharti Telecom, PCL, and JK Tyre. For the past five years, he’s been with Usha International, India’s leading consumer durable manufacturing and marketing company. He has a successful track record of helping organizations leverage IT for business. His contribution to business transformation has resulted in improved productivity, efficiency, cost savings, and new innovations. The winning streak was evident in the early years when Singh received the ‘Employee of the Year’ award for developing software using the reverse engineering methodology. Being a technologist, this was indeed a great achievement for him. Since then, he has never restricted himself to one technological area, and has always explored new technologies to leverage IT to help the organization improve productivity. Being a senior member of the IT department, reporting to the Group CIO, Singh is responsible for ensuring the upkeep of the IT infrastructure and various SAP deployments. He works on diversified projects, connects all stakeholders (employees, customers, management, etc.), and also manages IT/security at various business levels.

Some of his award-winning achievements are mobile sales force automation, server/storage consolidation using virtualization, and Customer Support Operation (CRM). Early in his career he won the ‘Best Employee of the Year’ award for the development of application using the reverse engineering methodology.

vision, and inspiring others to do the same. More importantly, a leader should not count how many followers he has, but count how many leaders he/she has created.

PROJECTS

The projects undertaken by Singh and his team helped the organization overcome its challenges, and enhance productivity with increased customer satisfaction. Notable among these are sales force automation, SAP BI (HANA), BPM, Dealer Management System, server & storage consolidation, and Warehouse Management Solution. These projects have won several awards. For instance, Customer Support Operation (CRM) won the InformationWeek EDGE Award in 2011 and server & storage consolidation won vForum and Technology Award in 2011. Mobility solution (mSFA) also won an award from a leading technology magazine in 2011; recently Singh won the Top 100 CISO Award 2012 for his contribution in the IT security domain.

www.informationweek.in

Diamond EDGE winners

26 to 30

silver EDGE winners

32 to 46

EDGE winners

48 to 104

watch the awards ceremony at: www.interop.in october 2012 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 21

EDGE methodology

n July 2012, the InformationWeek editorial team sent out invitations to IT Heads of user companies, system integrators, and PR agencies to nominate their clients for the EDGE awards. We received a phenomenal response to our call for entries. In totality, we received close to 200 nominations from different companies across the country. In the first phase, redundant and incomplete entries were removed from the list. Based on an internal assessment

parameters for edge Innovation/originality/ uniqueness of the concept Role of the solution in addressing a business issue Complexity of the project Criticality of the solution to the overall business Business impact/benefits (cost savings, improvement in efficiency, customer service, employee productivity, etc) ‘Own Assessment’ score (Jury assessment score for the overall project)

framework that focused broadly on the parameters of innovation, cost savings, scale and efficiency, this list was subsequently narrowed down to 166 projects. From this illustrious list of 166 projects, a filter was again applied, using the same parameters, to select 20 of the best projects. Projects of these 20 companies were submitted to an external jury who evaluated the projects on multiple parameters such as innovation; complexity of the problem and success of the solution; improvement in the market share, efficiency or productivity; cost savings; employee productivity; and the criticality of the solution to the overall business. Our jury members for EDGE include six eminent and respected academicians, who are well known for their understanding of the business of technology. (See ‘Meet the Jury’) In addition to these parameters, we added an ‘Own Assessment’ score that could be used by the jury member to rate a project based on his overall assessment. This could also be used if the jury member felt that the project was unique, and the parameters as described, did not adequately capture

its success/efficiency. Like every year, we decided the five Diamond EDGE winners based on the combined score, after totaling the scores for the parameters and the overall assessment score by the jury. The remaining 15 projects were conferred with the Silver EDGE award citation. We have applied a broad list of parameters to ensure that every project gets an equal opportunity to score. While some companies score on cost savings, others may have an advantage in terms of competitive ability. For example, a project in the area of BI or analytics may score high in the ‘Improving Market Share’ parameter, but less on ‘Innovation.’ Projects in the area of security may be critical to the competitiveness of a business, but may not give returns in terms of say, an increase in the market share. Similarly, a project on disaster recovery may not show returns in terms of cost savings, but may have been extremely crucial to the survival of the business. In totality, we have five Diamond EDGE winners, 15 Silver EDGE winners, and 146 EDGE winners (chosen from the list of 200 projects). .

meet the jury

subject matter Subhash Bhatnagar expert in the Honorary Professor e-governance field, IIM Ahmedabad Professor Subhash Bhatnagar is currently an Honorary Professor at the IIMA and an advisor to the NISG, Hyderabad. His current interests are in e-Government and ICT for rural development. He worked as an advisor to the World Bank for over six years, to mainstream e-governance in the activities of the Bank. His publications include: ICT and Development: Cases from India and Unlocking E-Government Potential published by SAGE.

informationweek october 2012

ushanto Mitra is the Sushanto Mitra CEO of the Society Chief Executive Officer, Society for for Innovation and Innovation & Entrepreneurship (SINE), Entrepreneurship (SINE). SINE IIT Bombay is the technology business incubator at IIT Bombay, which promotes early-stage technology ventures. Mitra is a management graduate with over 20 years experience in the technology and finance verticals. Before SINE, Mitra worked with Techcap India, a human resources and financial consulting services firm, which he founded in 1999. He has also held senior leadership positions at firms, such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers and HCL Infosystems.

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meet the jury

r Bharat Bhasker is currently the Professor of Information Technology and Systems, Head of Internet Commerce Research Center and former Dean of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow. Dr Bhasker is also a visiting professor at the ESSEC Business School, France; Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea; School of Business, University of Maryland; University of California; and University of Texas. Dr Bhasker holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics & Communications Engineering from IIT Roorkee; and Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Dr Bhasker has been conferred the ‘Best Professor of Information Technology Management’ at the Asia’s Best B-School Awards in Singapore. He was also conferred the ‘Best Professor of Information Technology’ at the Dewang Mehta Business School Awards at Mumbai held in September 2008. In January 2004, he was honored as the ‘Best Researcher in the field of Electronic Commerce’ by the McMaster World Congress, Hamilton, Canada. In 2001,

r Yajnik is a Ph.D. in Management Studies from NMIMS (University of Mumbai), a Master of Science (Technology) from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani (BITS Pilani) and Master of Management Studies from NMIMS (Mumbai University.) He has worked with Companies such as Wipro Infotech and Digital Equipment (HP) in areas spanning business development, learning services and program management. At NMIMS University, where he is currently Professor of Information Systems, he has taught courses in information systems management, marketing and perspective management. He has several publications to his credit at the national and international level. He is also a corporate trainer and has served on the Executive Boards of Information Technology and Management forums

informationweek october 2012

Rotary Club awarded him a Scroll of Honor for his work and public service in the field of Information Technology and Management. He won NASA’s Best Research Productivity Award in 1992 in recognition of his research contributions. Prior to joining IIM Lucknow, Dr Bhasker spent 11 years working in leading research establishments in the USA. He spent seven years with the Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA in leading research and research management positions. His research contributions in heterogeneous distributed database management systems, heterogeneous distributed information management, information retrieval from mass repositories, and network information retrieval protocols won him NASA’s Best Research Productivity Award in 1992. Dr Bhasker was a member of the High Performance Computer and Communications (HPCC) initiative of NASA that lead to the Information Superhighway project. He worked for four years with MDL Information Systems and Sybase, California, USA and was the architect of the massively

of India. In April 2003, he was awarded the NMIMS Best Faculty award for the year 2002-03. Dr Yajnik is on the Leadership Team and Member of the International Editorial Board of the India China America Institute, Atlanta, USA and on the Board of Editorial Reviewers of the International Conference on Innovation in Management, Poland. Dr Nilay Yajnik is on the Executive Committee of the Management Education Division of the Academy of Management USA, the Knowledge and Information Committee of the European Mediterranean Research Business Institute, the Executive Committee of the Bombay Management Association, India, the National Council of the Indian Society for Training and Development, the Managing Committee of the Computer

Dr Bharat Bhasker,

Professor of IT and Systems, Head of Internet Commerce Research Center, IIM Lucknow

parallel DBMS, Sybase MPP. Dr Bhasker serves in several advisory committees of the Indian Government. He is an honorary expert to the National Science Education and Research council of Canada, and a member of Governing Boards of several Engineering and Management Institutes. He has also served in several IT task forces and committees of the UP Government.

Dr Nilay Yajnik,

Professor and Chairman - Information Systems Area, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies

Society of India (Mumbai Chapter, and the IT Committee of the Indian Merchants Chamber.

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r Nandlal L Sarda is a professor in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. After receiving his M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from IIT Bombay, he joined as faculty in 1972, where he has been teaching ever since. He was also a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, between 1986 and 1988. Between 1994 and 1997, he was Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at IIT Bombay. In 2006, he was appointed Head of the Shailesh J Mehta School of Management. As Dean of Academic Programmes, IIT Bombay, Prof. Sarda co-ordinated with the IIT Senate and its various academic departments for creating, revising, implementing and supervising the institution’s academic programmes. He served as Professor-in-Charge of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, from October 2004 to February 2006. In this role he co-ordinated with the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) hosted by IIT Bombay, to encourage and

rofessor Pradeep Pendse has been associated with the Welingkar Institute of Management for more than 13 years. As Dean, Prof. Pendse defines the formal process for launching new programs. He also nurtures the internal innovation process within Welingkar. He has designed MBA-level and other post graduate programs. He is now drafting the first MMS (Systems) curriculum for the University of

This year’s nominations are both novel and have a wider impact either within the company or outside in terms of business partners, customers or the community. The participation of PSUs and government agencies is also noteworthy. IT in India seems to have gone beyond being just a facility or infrastructure to a more vibrant contributor to business strategy

actively facilitate IIT Bombay’s faculty and students to convert intellectual property developed by them into business ventures. Prof. Sarda’s main research interests are in the areas of database systems and software engineering. Recent research areas include temporal databases, data warehousing, and ontology-based schema integration. His research has been widely published in international journals and at conferences. He has also participated in many conferences. For instance, he was Programme Co-chair of VLDB’96, a premier international database conference, held in Mumbai. He was Programme Chair for the annual event of the Computer Society of India in December 2004. He was honored as Fellow of Computer Society of India at its convention in November 2006. Prof. Sarda is closely associated with many companies and government institutions as a consultant, offering advice on planning, selection, implementation Mumbai. Prof. Pendse has had a long innings spanning 25 years, of which he served 20 years in the industry. During this time he also devoted 15 years to academics. While serving the industry he assumed various roles like Systems/ Business Analyst and CIO/IT Consultant for numerous companies. He was also the Founder/CEO of a 100-employee IT solutions company that served nearly 50 corporates for 15 years. Many know Prof. Pendse for his two workshops on Project Leadership and Business Analysis, wherein he trained over 3,000 participants drawn from leading IT companies in India. Prof. Pendse is a visiting faculty at many leading B-schools in Mumbai such as S P Jain Institute of Management, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, NMIMS, TISS, and VJTI, to name a few. He has served on the Board of Studies, and as a paper setter/examiner for the University of Mumbai. He is also the recipient of

Dr Nandlal L Sarda,

Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay

and evaluation of IT solutions. He is a Director on the Board of Directors of Union Bank of India. He is on the Board of Directors of Clearing Corporation of India. He is also on the editorial board of some international journals.

Prof. Pradeep Pendse,

Dean, Welingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai

awards such as the Dewang Mehta Award for ‘Best IT Teacher in Business School’, CSI Chapter Patron Award for outstanding contribution, and ‘Distinguished Alumnus Award’ by the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 25

diamond edge

Essar improves group productivity with large scale desktop virtualization initiative

through this initiative. Today, more than 5,000 users (who constitute 80 percent of the targeted users) have already been moved to the desktop virtualization platform from Citrix. A WAN optimization solution has been implemented across locations for optimizing WAN bandwidth and ensuring that the impact of desktop virtualization on bandwidth is managed effectively. To ensure latency-free access of the virtual desktops across the LAN, Essar has upgraded the back-end network core in the data center to a 10 GB LAN using Cisco Nexus unified fabric. From an end user’s perspective, Essar has given access to common set of applications, such as MS Office suite and Adobe Acrobat to high-end software like AutoCAD and CorelDRAW . With desktop virtualization solution, Essar’s mobile staff (approximately 20 percent) can be present in remote areas and still have complete access to their desktops. It has also given Essar the ability to take full control of its desktop environment with the capability to manage applications and the OS on every device. In almost every parameter with respect to management and deployment (such as patching OS, configuring software, archiving, backing up data, rolling out and provisioning application), the Group has gained savings in the range of 40 to 50 percent.

Jayanta Prabhu CTO

Desktop virtualization initiative expected to save ` 10 crore per annum

By deploying a desktop virtualization solution from Citrix, Essar’s business has achieved lower TCO and enhanced manageability and security through consolidation and centralization of key resources. As the administration is centralized, anti-virus or firewall policies can be applied and monitored from the data center. The applications that can be accessed and run by the users can be restricted and even tracked. Due to better manageability and power savings, Essar expects huge benefits. For example, the OPEX for PC, application support and deployment charges for 5,000 PCs is estimated to be ` 5.4 crore over a period of three years. Post deployment of the initiative, this is expected to come down to just ` 1.2 crore. Similarly, power charges for a period of three years for 5,000 PCs is expected to be ` 7.2 crore, this is expected to be reduced to just 72 lakh. By virtue of using virtual desktop solution, the Essar Group estimates that it will save save ` 10 crore per annum. This solution has already been rolled out for 5,000 users and the target is to achieve 40,000 users by the year end.

informationweek october 2012

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Three-year OPEX for PC, application support and deployment charges for 5,000 PCs expected to be slashed from ` 5.4 crore to ` 1.2 crore Power charges for 3 years for 5,000 PCs expected to be slashed from ` 7.2 crore to ` 72 lakh

Company: Essar Group Project: Desktop Virtualization

snapshot

highlights

s a group with operations in more than 25 countries across five continents, and a workforce of 75,000 people, the Essar Group faced a serious challenge in terms of maintaining data security. The challenge became even more difficult with the need for users to be mobile, as well as the advent of portable devices with large disks capacities and application porting capabilities. Further complicating IT’s challenge were pressures from business and government regulatory agencies to secure access to sensitive customer and business information. After looking at all possible options, the Essar Group decided to embark on a full fledged desktop virtualization initiative. As the user group was large in number, Essar decided to go in for an ‘Unlimited Licensing’ agreement with Citrix for organization-wide rollout. What made this project unique and complex was the fact that this was the first time in India that an organization with such a huge user base spread across various geographical locations was attempting a large scale desktop virtualization initiative. With more than 100 companies and each company with its own set of applications and computing prowess, the need for consolidating systems and applications of all users in one single place was critical and was achieved

Project Head: N Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

MTS turns bonus concept on its head with interesting innovation

The system provides end-toend functionality of a campaign manager. Right from customer selection, automating communication for promoting the campaign to creating rules for providing benefits to customers based on certain qualification criteria and campaign feedback (analytics), the MBonus system provides all features. The MTS India team created a multidimensional customer grid based on several factors related to customer details like location and usage patterns. The solution has been designed in such a way that within few hours of a customer using a mobile phone, the call detail records are made available to the MBonus platform so that campaign qualification can happen on a near real-time basis. The basic idea underlying the proposed model of Mbonus was that the product was to be developed over time in a predictable manner with initial emphasis on product performance, then emphasis on product variety and later emphasis on product standardization and costs. Its ultimate success came upon gradual improvements, refinements, and modifications, the development of complementary technologies, as well as social learning. Today, MTS India has the flexibility Company: MTS India

Revenue increase of approximately 2 percent monthon-month Cost savings of approximately 20 percent in operational costs were achieved as the solution allows customers to target customers with customized campaigns

snapshot

highlights

f one looks at reward programs in telecom or other domains like banking or retail, the reward programs are designed to promote what the company wants to promote and not what the consumer wants to consume. Turning this concept on its head, MTS India has come up with a MBonus reward program which dynamically computes what the consumer needs and offers best deals on it. For example, if a subscriber has made five calls to Bangalore on a particular day, he could get a 20 percent off on his next call to Bangalore on the same day. Another customer who has made three calls to Tokyo on the the same day will get another offer customized to him, which could be 10 percent off on the next call to Tokyo on that day. In this program the customer is no longer a part of a market segment but he is a market segment in himself. It is this personalization in the reward program which makes MBonus a unique program not only in India but anywhere in the world. The MBonus program is powered by a complex yet ‘simple-to-use’ system which is an amalgamation of real-time business intelligence, a flexible campaign management system and a dynamic service provisioning system.

Project: Bonus program for customers Project Head: Manoj Shrivastava, Director - IT & Head - Integrated Technology and IT Governance

Manoj Shrivastava

Director - IT & Head Integrated Technology and IT Governance

of running campaigns only for the period of a day, week, month or even an hour. It has also enabled MTS to achieve greater success ratio in its campaigns by performing online analytics and giving its customers the benefits of on-the-fly offers based on their usage patterns. The revenue increase (of approximately 2 percent monthon-month over the last 6 months) is due to the dual factors of increased customer usage since customers see tangible benefits applied in real time on usage on the MTS network. The platform has also empowered business users to create their own campaigns. This has freed up the IT operations teams from understanding business needs and creating campaigns that the marketing team wanted to run. This has resulted in freeing up the effort of 2 person effort per month within the IT team, which is getting utilized to focus on continuous improvement activities.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 27

diamond edge

Online voting system shows huge potential for transforming governance

highlights

Â&#x2020; Compared to the average voter turnout at EVM booths of around 44.12 percent, the average voter turnout in the online voting system is more than 75.14 percent Â&#x2020; Considerable saving of time and money as manpower and overhead expenditures are eliminated in online voting

informationweek october 2012

online registration from the comfort of their home or office. From an administration point of view, there is a centralized control over the entire election process, which makes it more effective for election staff to manage various processes of online voting. This system publishes ward-wise results within minutes and hence saves time in result declaration. The system not only increases voter turnout, but also helps in eliminating voting patterns. For example, in a traditional system, contesting candidates are able to find out booth-wise voting figures. Hence, they become apprehensive towards the development of localities from where they have received lesser number of votes. In an online voting system, the counting is done ward-wise so candidates are not be able to find the voting patterns of their wards. This in turn helps in eliminating any bias towards people of particular areas. The system is replicable in terms of compatibility of policies, amendments and guidelines of election processes in all states of India. It can also be replicated in all local body elections such as municipalities, districts/tehsils/ village panchayats, co-operatives, colleges/universities, etc. Impressed with the system, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj Government of India has constituted a task force. This committee has specifically recommended the Company: State Election Commission, Gujarat

snapshot

hile free, equal and secret voting is fundamental for a democratic system, elections rarely manage to capture the true pulse of a society as a huge percentage of voters do not exercise their votes. Most voters find it inconvenient to travel to polling booths and stand in queues. Further, association of a voter to a particular booth affects mobility of the voter. Keeping these issues in mind, the State Election Commission, Gujarat (SEC) developed an online voting system. The objective was to encourage greater voter participation by providing an innovative, user-friendly and convenient option of voting. The system implements a specific cryptographic protocol to ensure that elections are carried on the principles of fairness, secrecy and anonymity in a transparent way. The system ensures end-to-end security right from voter registration, vote casting, counting and declaration of results. It also ensures strong authentication of voters to uniquely identify voters before casting votes The system was tested in General Elections of 6 Municipal Corporations (namely Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Bhavnagar, Rajkot, and Jamnagar) and subsequently in Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation. The initial results have been extremely encouraging. People can cast their vote and do an

Project: Online Voting System Project Head: Prakash Shah, State Election Commissioner

Prakash Shah

State Election Commissioner

online voting system in strengthening the institution of the State Election Commission, increasing voter participation, and curbing electoral malpractices. This pioneering project has attracted many other countries and states. For example, a delegation from Norway visited the SEC to study the implementation of the online voting system in Gujarat. Teams from SECs of various states including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana have visited Gujarat to see the actual implementation of the system during the Gandhinagar Municipal Corporation General Elections in April 2011. The SEC is now in the process of evaluating voting through e-polling booths including touchscreen and custom keyboard panels used as devices for voting. It has also proposed for integration with AADHAR (UIDAI) for voter verification. In the future, it is also expected that a majority of voters would be from age group of 19 to 35 years, who would be technology savvy, and hence voter participation in the online voting system would grow substantially.

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RFID helps Sesa Goa improve market share

highlights

Sesa Goa has increased its share of road logistics movement of iron ore from 28.8 to 34.89 percent Reduction in time per transaction has helped the firm save ` 2.4 crore The solution has helped in reducing 154 security guards on the weighbridges for 77 touchpoints, which in turn has led to savings of ` 1.85 crore

control over stock movement and logistics cost. As part of this solution, more than 7,000 trucks have been riveted with passive RFID tags on the truck body. Any truck, with riveted tag on it, is identified by software through the interface with RFID reader and antennae. The software solution also enables the touchpoint to read and write the data into the tag. At the weighbridge, the net weight is checked to make sure it is within the regulated weight issued by the government for road movement. Prior to deployment of the solution, security personnel used to collect physical documents generated at source weighbridge, which were used to reconcile with the trips later. Only count of the slip was considered for reconciliation as physical matching of slips with transaction would have been a huge task. This is because more than 3,500 slips were generated for a single location. Today, due to the RFID solution, there is complete transparency of material movement on a daily basis. All trips at security gates are captured by installed RF touchpoints, thus enabling automatic reconciliation between all touchpoints. The solution has also helped in complying better with regulations, as the system does not allow recording of transaction Company: Sesa Goa

snapshot

esa Goa is India’s largest exporter of iron ore in the private sector, and has mining operations in Goa, and Karnataka. With the surge in demand from Chinese market, iron ore export from Goa has significantly increased in the last four/five years. To seize this opportunity, mining companies in Goa, including Sesa Goa, increased their supply of iron ore. However, with various restrictions placed on road logistics in Goa and the increased movement of iron ore by all mining companies, Sesa Goa was faced with the task of transporting ore using more than 7,000 truck trips every day in a span of 7 hours from multiple sources and destinations. Such high volumes resulted in huge manpower deployment for reconciliation, contributed to lack of transparency, and led to many governance and control issues. To overcome the above issues, the company embarked on an automation project using RFID. This was designed to enhance the throughput of logistics operations with robust control, enhance transparency, and minimize the manual intervention. The objective was to capture the weight of material and recording of every movement of iron ore from one stock point to the other in an efficient manner, thereby enhancing internal

Project: RFID-based logistics system Project Head: PL Chockalingam, AVP – Risk Management & IT

PL Chockalingam

AVP – Risk Management & IT

for a truck, which has net weight more than the permissible weight. As a result of this solution, Sesa Goa has increased its share of road logistics movement of iron ore from 28.8 to 34.89 percent. Reduction in time per transaction has provided a benefit over trip cycle time. It enables the firm to ensure timely delivery of material to customer’s vessels, which in turn helps it in saving demurrage cost. As a result, for the year of 2011-2012, the firm saved ` 2.4 crore. Further, increase in throughput has resulted in reduced allocation of fixed cost per ton of ` 36 per ton, which amounts to ` 54 crore on an annual basis. The solution has also helped the firm in reducing 154 security guards on the weighbridges for 77 touchpoints, who were deployed for manual reconciliation and physical control on logistics operation. These personnel have since been re-deployed for other jobs and locations. This has helped the firm save ` 1.85 crore.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 29

diamond edge

YES BANK ensures hassle-free remittance for the masses

highlights

Round-the-clock services available at the nearby kirana shop at an affordable fee of 1 percent In 10 months of the roll out, the bank has registered 4.19 lakh transactions, and ` 254.85 crore has been remitted during this period 45 percent transactions took place in after-banking hours

informationweek october 2012

BCA outlets. Thus, the bank along with its first BCA partner, Suvidhaa Infoserve, developed an application and tested it for customer friendliness, security penetration and central monitoring. The application was deployed in the market at 40 BCA locations in June 2011. With the help of this program, the users can deposit cash at the bank’s Banking Correspondent outlets and are not required to go to their own bank branches. Also, users do not need to be customers of YES BANK to avail this program. To transfer cash, the sender is first required to register himself and the recipient at the BCA store by providing state, city, bank and branch details. The sender then gets an One Time Pin (OTP) along with details of the beneficiary and has to confirm the details by sharing the OTP with the BCA Store. The request is queued up in the bank’s NEFT cycle and sent to the beneficiary’s bank. In case a transaction fails due to any reason at the beneficiary’s bank, the system initiates an SMS to the sender along with an OTP. The sender can then go to the BCA store, share the OTP and collect the refund; the fee charged to the sender is also refunded. The service is increasingly gaining popularity — starting with 12 senders in the month of June 2011, the base has grown to include 53,000 senders by December 2011. The transactions have also been growing — 400 a week in July Company: YES BANK

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or migrant workers working in cities, sending money to their families in hometowns is a cumbersome task. Since a large population of workers does not have KYC documents to open their accounts in cities where they work, they open a bank account in their hometowns. These workers rely on anywhere banking module offered by various banks to deposit cash in their hometown account. As the banks typically open only couple of counters for three-four hours in the morning for this segment, the workers have to stand in long queues, which in turn results in the loss of their daily wages. Considering the pain points of these migrant workers, YES BANK embarked on a mission to offer convenient domestic remittance services to the masses. While interacting with the masses for the project, the bank realized that to be able to participate in remittance service, a bank needs to have a vast expanse of branch and network presence — and its 250 branches will not completely serve the purpose. To resolve this issue, the bank came up with a service model of having convenient Banking Correspondent Agents (BCA) stores. It decided to re-align the available infrastructure of BCA by leveraging the available NEFT technology platform to facilitate the public at large to deposit cash at these

Project: Convenient domestic remittance service to the masses Project Head: Amit Sethi, Senior President & Chief Information Officer

Amit Sethi

Senior President & Chief Information Officer

to 20,000 a week in December 2011 and there has been similar quantum growth in the value of transactions, increasing from ` 50,000 a day to ` 20 million a day. Total value of remittance has been ` 800 million that generated a fee income of ` 8 million. Today, the bank has a total of 1,500 active BC agents, with 1.41 lakh sending customers availing this service and 73,700 receiving customers in various banks. The bank also noted 7 percent transactions within same city, which implies that business users were also using this service. With the current charges of minimum ` 10 per ` 1,000 remitted (1 percent approx), the bank has already created crores of rupees income for the program since inception. Keeping an average of 5 transactions of ` 5,000 per day per BCA Store, through 100,000 stores by end of March 2013, the bank is expecting to achieve daily top-line run rate of ` 21 million for the program and bottomline of ` 3.7 million for the bank. The bank sees huge potential in offering the service to retailers and distributors and intends to offer this service across the country under the brand name YES Money.

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silver edge

Atul transforms material procurement using open source route

‘M

Online portal has helped Atul in reducing the timeframe for material procurement process by 66 percent Reduced on-hand inventory by 13 percent from an average of 60 days to 52 days Zero delay in “Accounts Payable Invoice” creation which took three to four days earlier

informationweek october 2012

To address this issue, Atul developed and implemented an innovative ‘online vendor portal’ and an automated landed cost computation based ‘Quotation Comparison System (QCS)’ — which was then seamlessly integrated with Financial, Purchasing and Inventory modules of ‘Oracle eBusiness Suite R12 ERP’ as well as ‘QlikView’ Business Intelligence Dashboard. The development initiative was carried out by the Atul IT team on the XAMPP (X-Cross Platform – Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl) platform and MySQL open database at the backend. This solution has four modular systems integrated with the core Oracle eBusiness Suite R12 ERP, which has resulted into an end-to-end seamless ITenabled Material Procurement System. Through the online vendor portal, the vendors of Atul are able to assess purchase enquiries floated by Atul’s purchase department. Subsequent to the submissions by vendors, the quotation comparison system automatically generates the landed cost comparison for the purchase enquiry in reference, and forwards the quotation comparison sheet to the buyer of the purchase department for deciding on the purchase order on the shortlisted vendors based on the landed cost. The integrated open source vendor portal has resulted in several key Company: Atul Limited

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aterial Procurement‘ through the vendor supply chain is a vital and critical process for any manufacturing organization, and in a diverse multi-vertical process manufacturing conglomerate like Atul, this function plays a pivotal and key role. Atul procures more than 28,000 materials from over 8,700 vendors every year to produce 4,000 assorted product SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) across its 7 manufacturing verticals at three geographic locations. However, at Atul, the ‘Procurement Process’ cycle was hampered by cyclic and cascading effects of compounded inefficiency. Due to lack of visibility and high error rate, the process was vulnerable to high risks, which impacted productivity. Despite having a world-class ERP, in the form of Oracle eBusiness suite R12, the procurement process was not streamlined and operational end-toend on the ERP platform because the crucial sub-process of vendor quotation receipt, landed cost comparison and vendor final quote purchase order conversion was not available in the standard version of the purchasing module. The non-availability of this crucial and pivotal functionality resulted in manual intermediate sub-process of ‘Quotation Compilation’ and creation of manual ‘Quotation Comparison Statement’.

Project: Open source vendor portal for material procurement Project Head: Rajat Sharma, President-IT

Rajat Sharma President-IT

benefits for Atul. Firstly, the firm has saved ` 430 lakh on TCO as it could deliver an equivalent open source solution compared to a proprietary solution. Today, there is complete transparency and accountability of the entire procurement cycle and clear visibility of spend through centralized tracking of transactions. It has also resulted in enhanced productivity as the purchase team is able to spend less time on transactional operations and more time on strategic sourcing and vendor relationship activities. Atul also has absolute control on approved maintenance expenditure as no purchase order can be released through the system over and above the ear-marked limit value. The firm has managed to eliminate paper handling, filing and costs related to physical storage. Due to the portal, Atul has reduced the timeframe for material procurement process by 66 percent. It has also managed to reduce on-hand inventory by 13 percent from an average of 60 days to 52 days. This has a direct impact on working capital.

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Power and Load Management System ensures accurate load forecasting

PALMS uses SAS Load Forecasting Engine and SAS Smart Load Forecaster, which is a level up from the prevalent practice of the intelligent guesswork that is the result of tracking historical load patterns coupled with the current weather forecast and past weather trends. It is integrated with AMR (Automated Meter Reading) and SAP. The data is populated from various sources, including four weather stations, India Meteorological Department, AMR, Regional Load Dispatch Center website, supervisory control and data acquisition and calendar events. Earlier, the system of forecasting at the company was more of a manual guesswork, wherein the forecast accuracy was 89-90 percent — the 10 percent error resulted in revenue losses and customer dissatisfaction. Further, data integration and calculations from various sources in a manual process also contributed to this high error percentage. Post deployment, the company is able to estimate load flow in the system and make decisions for preventing overloading and maintaining grid discipline. Timely implementations of such forecasted result-oriented decisions have led to improvement in the company’s network reliability and reduction in the occurrences of equipment failures and blackouts. Apart from this, accurate load forecasting Company: BSES Reliance ADA Group

The company’s forecast accuracy and consistency today is up to 99 percent It registered cost reduction to the tune of 90 percent Consumer satisfaction index has reached 99.9 percent

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oad forecasting has always been important for planning and operational decisions taken by utility companies. For the financial performance of the utilities, it is important to make an accurate forecast of the demand in order to efficiently deal with the shortages or surpluses. However, electric load forecasting is not easy as the power demand for any duration is governed by many factors, such as temperature, humidity, customer acquisition, infrastructure development and events, which are mostly uncontrollable. BSES was looking for a solution that could identify and capture all these factors to forecast short-term demand. Thus, the company, in collaboration with SAS Institute, undertook a project titled, PALMS (Power and Load Management System). The primary drivers to implement this project were growing electricity demand and increasing prices of the raw materials, specifically the fuel costs. Since, power purchases ranges 70-80 percent of the total input costs, the company wanted a solution with effective forecasting abilities to improve profitability and protect end consumers from inflationary pressure. The company wanted to gain demand visibility (@15 minutes buckets) so that power procurement can be done diligently to reduce unnecessary losses.

Project: PALMS (Power and Load Management System) Project Head: K.B.Singh, Vice President – IT

K.B.Singh

Vice President – IT

has helped the company to make important decisions including decisions on purchasing, load switching and infrastructure development. Lower operational costs due to accurate forecasts, planned procurement and the savings accrued from the more precise planning has reduced power costs, which in turn has direct bearing on customer tariffs. Hence, the consumer satisfaction index has reached 99.9 percent. The project has created a tremendous impact on the company’s business bottomline — it noted cost reduction in the tune of 90 percent due to less procurement cost rate and increased margin, minimal cost of holding and lesser distribution cost. The total project cost was ` 2.5 crore, however the company recovered the project cost in nearly six months. In addition, with more accurate centralized forecasting application, requirements for multiple IT silo application development have reduced, resulting in less manpower deployment.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 33

silver edge

Claims process automation boosts productivity at Cholamandalam Insurance

activities and improve its productivity and turnaround time in processing a claim. With this goal in mind, the firm created a workflow solution built on a BPM framework Post implementing the workflow application, there has been a visible change in process efficiency and throughput. Work is allocated automatically based on business rules. The solution has also ensured a detailed escalation process to handle grievances. The firm has witnessed a 38 percent reduction in risk post implementation and a 56 percent reduction in areas that were categorized as high-risk areas. Control points or quality gates ensure that responsibility throughout the process flow is fixed with various stakeholders and they are accountable for the same. Post implementation of the solution, there has been a reduction of actual processing time by 25 minutes per claim. For an average volume of 200 files per day, the estimated savings are close to 5,000 minutes, resulting in savings of time for 10.6 full-time employees. Overall, the new process reduces the claim processing time by six days, thereby providing enhanced customer service. In case of any legal dispute, data retrieval about a claim is just a click away as against the previous process,

38 percent reduction in risk post implementation

Company: Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company

Reduction of actual processing time by 25 minutes per claim

Project: Automation of claims processing

Total cost savings of ` 18.5 lakh due to reduced courier costs and time saved of full-time employees

informationweek october 2012

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he Motors Claims process at Cholamandalam MS Insurance was a manual process where the claim file was handled by various personnel across geography. As soon as a customer intimated a claim, a claim file was prepared and the file moved from one desk to the other for review and approval. This process was cumbersome and had little process control. When a customer called to enquire about the status of the claim, the claim processing officer had to track the file manually and send mails and wait until he got a response to get back to the customer Typically, the file moved from regional offices to the head office for review and approval. The data from the claims file was captured across multiple software applications. The average time taken to process a claim for private car was 18 days and 30 days for a commercial vehicle. In addition to the huge time period in processing a claim, there was risk of losing or misplacing a file in transit. There was inconsistency of data capture due to the non-availability of a system. Further, manual transcripts of an assessor’s report led to difficulty in interpretation. The firm wanted to streamline and automate the motor claims process by removing non-value added

Project Head: Sundar Venkitakrishnan, Senior VP – IT and Operations

Sundar Venkitakrishnan Senior VP – IT and Operations

which would take three days because the physical file had to be retrieved from the record management unit. The firm has recorded an estimated reduction of ` 50,000 in the courier cost per month. Also, by saving time for 10.6 full-time employees, the firm has saved ` 11 lakh. In total, the firm has recorded savings of ` 18.5 lakh per year post implementation of the solution. Previously, when a customer called to enquire about the status of the claim, the claim processing officer had to track the file manually and send mails and wait until he got a response to get back to the customer. Today, the system sends automated SMSes and e-mails intimating the status of the claim to the customer. This has not only improved transparency, but has also enabled the firm to provide better customer service. In addition, with the reduction in application touchpoints, average call handling time for the CRM team has reduced by 60 seconds.

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Essar Steel plots perfect route for production

parameters became the mandate to operate when multiple technologies are deployed to produce similar material. The solution translates the requirement of customers into plans/ schedules and production instructions, which need no human intervention. Using quotation data, system identifies the least cost and the best quality production route using multiple routes. The solution also provides the flexibility to change the mill due to dynamic plant conditions. Before the MDS system was implemented, the SCM team (a team of 8 people) was keeping a track of each and every sales order that was entered by the marketing team. While tracking, the main task was to analyze the capability of both production routes, compare cost figures and then manually divert the sales order to the production route that was derived by manual calculations. Manual calculations were causing delays in the delivery of goods, which led to errors in taking decisions and in turn led to problems in fulfilment of promises given to customers. Today, the ability to fulfil an order has improved significantly. Manual errors have reduced and the effort to track sales orders and divert as required using Excel-based calculators are eliminated. The system

Savings of nearly ` 74 lakhs per month is envisaged

Company: Essar Steel India Limited

Savings of 4 hours per day for the SCM team

Project: Mill distribution system

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ssar Steel’s Indian operations were expanding in terms of capability and capacity by adding new production lines. It is the single largest integrated steel plant in India that produces 10 MTPA using a composite mix of complex iron and steel making technologies. With increasing and varied capabilities and capacities, it was required to know and decide the best quality and most cost effective route for production well before it started to manufacture a product for any customer. A unique and innovative solution called ‘Mill Distribution System’ (MDS) was designed and developed using SAP Netweaver as front-end technology and SAP, i2 (JDA) Factory Planner as the back-end system. This in turn was tightly integrated with online real-time data flow to support business operations. This helped in getting the best output from the plant while details of the parameters remained transparent to the sales executive. As each product had multiple routes for production, it was essential to fix one route in the system while ordering for a material. Using system intelligence, the system today provides the planner a facility to identify optimum process path for a particular order based on capability, quality, capacity and cost. These

Project Head: Suneel Aradhye, CIO

Suneel Aradhye CIO

automatically determines the least cost route considering capability, capacity, quality and cost of the multiple routes selected for the product required by a sales order. The SCM team is at ease as all the checks are done by the system online in a real-time mode from the data collated from various systems. There is complete transparency in the entire process with historical data stored for all analytics. This has also resulted in enhanced quality as the system also takes into consideration the quality aspect while selecting the best possible route. Effective and informed decision making between the multiple production routes has been the most important advantage. This has saved nearly 4 hours a day of the SCM team. This has also saved huge time that was typically lost in follow-ups between sales team/production units, quality team and the costing team to get required data and keep the manual calculator (made in Excel) updated.

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silver edge

Integrated solution supports disparate insurance business models

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Elimination of administration/ back office cost for these transactions has resulted in cost savings of about ` 16 lakh per month Project revenues from existing partners have increased by approximately 20 percent Reduction in operation cost of policy issuance through brokers by approximately 70 percent

informationweek october 2012

facility to issue insurance policies at the point of sale through partner’s existing system. The company developed a B to B partner integration system, SANYOJAK in-house by investing about 12 man month’s effort, with overall cost of ` 21 lakh. As the system didn’t require any additional infrastructure, there was no additional direct cost involved on IT infrastructure/software. Earlier, there was no standard protocol for data transfer between brokers, dealers, franchise and insurers. The issue has been addressed with the help of configurable transformation engine in SANYOJAK. Today, partners use their core business system for vehicle sale or travel ticketing and same data is transformed and sent to IFFCO TOKIO’s system by SANYOJAK. In response, insurance policy is issued by IFFCO TOKIO’s system and is made available in a partner’s system. The system also allows adding a new partner with just a simple configuration. The implementation of SANYOJAK has facilitated a new distribution channel for acquiring business — the company is now able to tie up with many more intermediaries. It has registered an increase of about 20 percent in revenue growth. Also, the project revenue from existing partners has increased by nearly 20 percent. The company’s presence on various broker’s portals has helped in brand building. Company: IFFCO TOKIO General Insurance Company

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ith advancement in technology, sales and marketing channels in the general insurance industry have shifted from manual mode of retail sale through agents to web-based integrated systems that provide online issuance of policies over the counter. IFFCO TOKIO General Insurance, a company with more than 300 offices across the country, was offering different web-based integrated systems for its various partners. For example, its partners from the automobile industry were using policy issuance system in their dealer management module to procure motor insurance business; its travel portal partners were using policy issuance along with the ticketing solutions targeted to travel agent or general public; and insurance brokers were using a separate solution to provide rate comparison for different insurers for various types of insurance to the general public. With these disparate systems for different business models, the company was facing various challenges. These systems required manual interventions, huge maintenance efforts and high time to market — all these issues were affecting the company’s bottomline. To ensure seamless integration with brokers operating with different business models, IFFCO TOKIO embarked on a project to provide a

Project name: B to B Partner Integration – SANYOJAK Project Head: U C Dubey, Executive Director (IT)

U C Dubey

Executive Director (IT)

SANYOJAK also provides integration with Payment Gateway to accept electronic payment such as Internet banking, credit and debit cards. Since the solution helps in issuing policies immediately over the counter, it eliminates costs involved in back office operations, administration and policy printing/ dispatch etc. Through this channel, the company issued approximately 20,000 policies every month — assuming back office processing cost of ` 80 per policy, there is direct saving of ` 16 lakh per month. Post implementation of the solution, the use of papers/forms and their handling has been reduced to a large extent, which has in turn reduced the turnaround time from almost a week to instantaneous. The company has also been able to reduce delay in remittances, which has resulted in improved cash flow. The solution has enabled the company to improve customer service as they don’t need to wait for weeks to receive their policies. They also have a choice to select an insurer to meet their requirements through various insurance portals by comparing price and other features.

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How Indian Oil transformed its HR function using IT

data trustworthiness. Additionally, IOCL had an IT infrastructure consisting of multiple legacy payroll systems and multiple legacy employee portals. Before it could undertake this initiative, IOCL also had to complete the task of converting a huge amount of data. It estimated that nearly 4 million data elements required conversion. It had to also create an employee master file for about 36,000 employees and 20,000 separated employees, while simultaneously keeping a track from hiring till separation. It also had to undertake a modification of about 330,000 employee records (both past and present). IOCL also had to ensure a running payroll for around 36000 employees on existing single instance production system without affecting the performance and response time. IOCL wanted to design a solid foundation for extending functionality to include payroll, travel, performance management and succession planning. To implement the same, initial requirement was of re-structuring HR data using the uniform coding structure and definitions in SAP HR module for uniform definitions of enterprise, personnel and organizational structure across all divisions. A total of 119 processes related to payroll, time travel and claims were harmonized to bring uniformity in business rules, ractices and Policies across the organization. Company: Indian Oil Corporation

A total of 119 processes were harmonized to bring uniformity in business rules and policies From 5 percent of time, effort and cost devoted to strategy, IOCL has been able to raise this to 20 percent; the focus on performance enhancement has been raised from 25 to 40 percent Reduction in HR and payroll process cycle by 70 percent

Project: HR Transformation

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n organization with more than 36,000 employees, Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) wanted to create and build a strong human resource management platform with organization-wide standards that could scale to support IOCL’s growth, value chain integration and portfolio diversification strategy and unfasten newer dimensions like career planning, succession planning, performance management and Employee Self Services (ESS). IOCL aptly named this project, as ‘Driving HR Transformation through Information Technology’. The goal was to use Human Capital Management Restructuring, which could bring the entire corporation on a uniform personnel, enterprise and organizational structure using the uniform coding structure and definitions in SAP HR module. While the goal was ambitious, IOCL had to cross over numerous technical challenges. For example, phased implementation and go-live over past 10 years covering 1,400 locations of IOCL made governance of SAP PA module enterprise and personnel structures difficult and non-uniform. The basic HR master record definitions were created at a divisional level instead of an enterprise-wide standard. Interdivisional discrepancies led to inaccurate data maintenance, thereby impacting the

Project Head: S Ramasamy, Executive Director, Information Systems

S Ramasamy

Executive Director, Information Systems

Post implementation, IOCL has achieved huge benefits in its transformation initiative. Routine activities have been reduced, while areas of strategic importance have gained prominence. For example, from 5 percent of time, effort and cost devoted to strategy, IOCL today has been able to raise this to 20 percent. The SAP data accuracy levels are now at an impressive 99.7 percent. Lead time for reporting has been slashed from 3-4 days to nil today. IOCL has also achieved reduction in HR and payroll process cycle by 70 percent. This translates to huge manpower savings associated with payroll and payments. Similarly, reduction in payroll inputs from locations has been reduced from 5-7 days to nil today. Claim to payment process time has been reduced by 90 percent. With the implementation of unified centralized payroll across Indian Oil, data of 36,000 plus employees could be standardized and harmonized with common definitions across all the structures of the organization. The full HR process from hiring to retiring of an employee can now be captured within the system.

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silver edge

Comprehensive framework helps Infosys improve compliance posture

At an organization level, the process provides a birds’ eye view on compliance to commitments at every customer level, as well as at an organization level. It has also helped in formalizing a comprehensive structure to de-risk the organization from any contractual breach. As a result, there has been a significant reduction in noncompliance for critical obligations by 1/10th and for high category obligations by 1/15th. In addition, there has been an increase in overall compliance across the organization with more than 95 percent of accounts being compliant to all critical and high category obligations. A secured web-based access with a robust workflow ensures that the system is accessible to all key stakeholders in the organization and decision-making across geographies is handled in a seamless manner. Earlier, time and effort spent by stakeholders was significantly high, which resulted in lower process adherence levels. Post implementation of the system, rigor in compliance tracking and reporting has resulted in significant improvement in compliance performance, and a significant reduction in cycle time. Compliance certification cycle time has reduced by 20 days, while effort savings are in the Company: Infosys

Compliance certification cycle time has been reduced by 20 days Effort savings are in the range of 150-200 percent More than 95 percent of accounts being compliant to all critical and high category obligations

informationweek october 2012

Project: Compliance Framework

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ith increasing number of engagements encompassing multiple vendors and multiple lines of service for a customer, there was an implicit need for Infosys to have a formal mechanism to track and ensure contractual compliance. Infosys wanted to create a comprehensive framework to achieve the objective of increasing the awareness on contractual clauses to a larger community of project managers and also ensure that it de-risked itself from any exposure to contractual breach inadvertently. To address this business need, a comprehensive process ably institutionalized by an internal system was implemented to ensure contractual compliance for more than 95 percent of the accounts. Understanding that good contractual risk management requires collaboration from various functions of company, Infosys created SharePoint-based collaboration portals. This ensured that users worked collectively and exchanged best practices. The system supports more than 6,000 users across various roles, functions and locations spanning across multiple geographies. Despite the large user base and concurrency needs, the system offers robust and fast transaction processing.

Project Head: Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, VP & Group Head – Information Systems

Ganesh Gopalakrishnan

VP & Group Head – Information Systems

range of 150-200 percent. The cost savings as a result of better compliance are estimated to be USD 6.3 million. In addition to reducing penalties, better understanding of contracts has enabled the Infosys team to provide more business value to customers. Post implementation of the system, there has been zero payout for compliance-related issues. At an account level, Infosys succeeded in convincing a customer in preventing implementation of a non-contractual requirement, leading to savings of USD 100,000. Better negotiation on infrastructure-related requirement saved USD 6.3 million in a five-year contract. For an organization with multi-vendor, multi-geography service delivery model, the solution has helped in institutionalizing the process of compliance, while reducing the operational overhead in managing complex contracts.

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CSA enables L&T Infotech to gain customer insights from social networks

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With its own open source-based solution, the company has been able to save USD 600 per month, per user, considering the cost of commercial sentiment analysis tools It can strategize decisions like modifying PR and market messages It can track gender-based responses and analyze locationwise sentiments for a product

processing tools. The tool allows users to connect to various sources of social media like Twitter, Facebook, blog/ URLs, RSS feeds, etc. It uses various sentiment calculation algorithms, such as polarity-based sentiment analysis, Latent Dirichlet Analysis, Logistics Regression, spell checker, Co-Reference Analyzer, Subjective/objective-based sentiment analysis, Machine language translation, etc. The deployment of CSA has enabled the company’s different business units to gather new customer insights from social networks. It has helped the company in preserving and enhancing customer satisfaction ratings, optimizing communication strategies, and monitoring and analyzing market sentiments. CSA has also helped the company in strategizing decisions like modifying PR and market messages based on negative and positive sentiments for various services. Today, the company is able to track sentiments from analysts, news reports, competitors, employers, etc. It is also able to track gender-based responses not just from Twitter but also from various blogs, sentences, phrases and paragraphs available at various sites from web — this information proves useful in targeting the right segment of market. The company can analyze location-wise sentiments for a product, Company: Larsen & Toubro Infotech

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survey conducted by Universal McCann revealed that 32 percent of the 200 million bloggers worldwide blog about opinions on products and brands and 71 percent of the 625 million active Internet users actually read blogs. Considering the reach and impact of social media, L&T Infotech was keen on tapping the social sentiments for its various groups. The company wanted to understand contextual sentiments to get answers to various questions like, “How does L&T Infotech fair vis-àvis its competitors,” “What are analysts saying about L&T Infotech,” and “What is media reporting about L&T Infotech.” While tools like Google Alerts enable businesses to track these conversations manually, it is quite a cumbersome task to track tweets, updates and reviews across multiple social channels. To resolve this issue, the company decided to deploy an automatic sentiment analysis solution. Although many sentiment analysis tools are available in the market, L&T Infotech chose to implement its own Contextual Sentiment Analysis (CSA) solution due to three major reasons — commercial tools were expensive, data scientists were not readily available and existing tools did not provide contextual sentiment analysis. L&T Infotech’s CSA is based on open source natural language

Project: Contextual Sentiment Analysis Project Head: Bharati Lele, Head - Innovation Labs

Bharati Lele

Head - Innovation Labs

which helps in re-aligning strategy and focus. Apart from this, the tool allows generation of reports at userdefined frequency like hourly, daily and weekly. The tool also provides a metric that represents the breakdown of mentions about the keyword by specific platforms, which enables the company to figure out where most of the conversation is happening and where it should focus its listening and engagement efforts. It supports spam analysis on reviews given on the product websites. Post deployment of the solution, the company is no longer required to undertake the mammoth tasks of posing a question, searching the web for opinion, summarizing the analysis manually or surveying thousands of people by telephone and analyzing the survey results. Thus, it has been able to cut on the cost of such activities, which can run in tens of thousands of dollars. By measuring sentiments of customer feedback, the company has been able to increase customer engagement and has become more responsive to customer needs.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 39

silver edge

Compliance dashboard ensures proactive compliance at Mahindra Real Estate

Mahindra. Presented in the form of a dashboard, the solution is a proactive monitoring tool, developed to ensure 100 percent compliance to both external (government), as well as internal statutes. The solution informs team members about their current due, overdue and upcoming tasks. The dashboard provides top management with the complete compliance status across all locations on a single page. Once a specific schedule for each location is defined in the system, tasks are assigned to specific employees. Based on the location compliance calendar, automated actions are triggered by the system. Escalations are triggered through mail, starting five days before the actual due date. The e-mail notification only stops if the user uploads the required document in the repository. A final escalation to the managing director is sent a day before the due date to ensure compliance. Today, post deployment, the solution has made a marked difference by its ability to provide proactive alerts and compelling users to take action. As a result, there is no manual follow-up required from central locations, as was the case earlier. Previously, record maintenance was a complete manual activity. Company: Mahindra Real Estate

Avoidance of probable noncompliance costs of around ` 25 lakh per annum Time savings of 2112 hours, which roughly translates to savings of around ` 10-12 lakh per annum

informationweek october 2012

Project: Compliance dashboard

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iven the huge number of regulations that any corporate today has to comply with, it is a daunting task to effectively ensure compliance. Mahindra Real Estate was facing a similar challenge. The requirement primarily came from the Finance & Accounts teams who had the gruesome task of ensuring timely deposit of various taxation documents like service tax, State VAT etc., with authorities at different locations. To ensure compliance, paper documents were maintained at different locations according to requirements. With the rise in number of regulations as well as documents, the ability to retrieve these documents proved to be time consuming and cumbersome. To resolve this issue, there was a need felt by the company to streamline the entire process. The management wanted to monitor the timeliness of completion and have the ability to retrieve the records electronically. This would also prove useful during audits as external auditors sometimes requested for data for the past 4-5 years. To resolve these issues, the IT team at Mahindra Real Estate decided to develop a comprehensive compliance management tool. This tool was developed in such a way that it could also be useful for other group companies of Mahindra &

Project Head: Girish Hadkar, Head-IT

Girish Hadkar Head-IT

Files were maintained and a group of such files were shifted to a common location. Now data is available in electronic format and is easily accessible from the comfort of an individual employee’s seat. During audits, a lot of time was spent on locating the required documents on specific queries from auditors. These queries pertained to previous years as well — older the query longer was the time it would take to locate the required documents. Now with an easy search option, the team can locate any document in seconds. The team now can also give the auditor access, which can be used by an auditor to see whatever he wants to verify. This system has also made the entire process less person-dependent, as information for previous years can also be retrieved easily. The practice has now been identified as a best practice by the Group, and is identified for rollout across other companies of Mahindra & Mahindra.

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Automation enables Marico to transform merchandizing process

highlights

Â&#x2020; Earlier processes of 10 percent sample physical audit has been now converted into 100 percent virtual audit Â&#x2020; Better control of inventory of merchandising material worth over ` 10 crore

activity at the store. The communication to the merchandiser went through a physical process. To address these issues, the IT team at Marico created a merchandizing application. This application had a webbased module that helped the trade marketing manager to create a campaign for new product promotion and the applicable number of stores. The regional sales development managers could identify the stores within their region where the merchandising activities could be carried out. Based on the number of stores, the system could plan the inventory required for the promotional activities. The system has a feature to store the route map for each merchandiser. This consists of the stores that the merchandiser would visit each day in a week. The system accordingly arrives at the inventory the merchandiser should carry while visiting the store. This was supported by a mobile application that was loaded on the mobile carried by every merchandiser. At each store, the merchandiser also gets a display of the list of activities that he has to carry out at the store. At the store, a merchandiser takes the image of the store, the display of products, the banners and posters. He also takes a pre-image and a post-image of each material. Each image has a GPS tag that identifies the co-ordinates at which the images have been taken. This Company: Marico

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imilar to every large product company, which has products that are displayed at retail outlets, Marico too wanted to significantly improve its merchandizing process. The merchandising process is a critical sales enabler, as it helps in driving sales by increasing the awareness of products among consumers through efficient visual display. The task of ensuring that the retail outlets are furnished with banners, posters and items lies with the merchandiser. Besides ensuring awareness and visibility of new products, the merchandiser also has to ensure proper use of merchandising inventory through timely availability and upkeep. To verify the activities performed by the merchandiser, an auditor is appointed to physically visit the site and verify the proper display and merchandising activities carried out at the retail store. The retailer is paid on the basis of the merchandising activity. After analyzing its merchandising process, Marico realized that the physical process had several inherent gaps like pilferage of merchandising material, improper coverage of stores, time lag between physical process and the audit process, dispute on payouts and loss due to improper payouts. In addition, there was also a significant time lag between the retail store selection and the actual merchandising

Project: Merchandising Application Project Head: Girish Rao, Head-IT

Girish Rao Head-IT

feature acts as a control to prevent a merchandiser from recording images of other stores and substituting them. This process also helps in keeping track of the completion of the merchandising activity and also the quality of the activity. As images are centrally stored at a server, it allows auditors to view and give a rating to each of the images. This also helps the sales team to decide if a payout can be made to the retail store. Today, Marico has complete visibility into the merchandising process. The application can also be used to track the visibility of the products in the retail space and help decision makers like trade marketing managers to make the right decisions. The overall productivity of the merchandiser has increased because he has a guide on the app, which tells him precisely the inventory to be carried, the outlets to be visited and the sequential activities to be carried. The entire sales team, including the distributor sales representative, the territory sales in charge, the area sales manager and the trade marketing manager get instantaneous visibility of the merchandising activity.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 41

silver edge

EHR enables Max Healthcare to offer right medication to right patient at right time

highlights

Reduction in average length of stay by 12 percent and release time during discharge process by 7 percent 20 percent reduction in paper consumption Over 197,511 patients were serviced — an increase of 25 percent from the last year Increase in occupancy rates from 63 percent to 72 percent

informationweek october 2012

interfaced with laboratory, radiology and pharmacy to allow real-time access to any patient record. The system included Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) for documenting, ordering, reporting and viewing of clinical information. Apart from this, BCMA was implemented along with unit dose dispensing policy to track and reduce waste, returns and medication errors. An m-health system for accessing laboratory reports and radiology images was also implemented for improving turnaround times of starting care plans. As a part of the project, all hospitals were equipped with Wi-Fi at the Point of Care and Computers on Wheels (COWs) were deployed to extend the reach of the system to the bedside. Today, Max healthcare facilities catering to 1,000 beds have gone live using the system and all the patients admitted have their records on the system. Till date, the system has approximately processed data of 104,130 patient-days across the facilities that are live with 3,123,900 pharmacy orders, 2,603,250 laboratory orders, 520,650 radiology orders and 312,390 bedside procedures. The system ensures that patient care intervention proceed after doctors’ electronic orders on the system. It requires nurses to verify and complete all orders depending Company: Max Healthcare Institute

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ax Healthcare has been at the forefront of delivering healthcare in Delhi-NCR and is now extending to other parts of northern India. The group was using a Hospital Information System (HIS) and wanted to move to an Electronic Health Records (EHR) system, with CPOE (Computerized Physician Order Entry), CDSS (Clinical Decision Support System) and BCMA (Bar Code Medication Administration) for closed loop medication administration. With HIS, the group was facing several challenges, including the dependency of systems and procedures on the physical presence of doctor; fragmented patient data leading to delayed clinical decisions; and difficulty in accessing old patient records. The time-consuming physical movement of paper records across the hospital resulted in treatment delays. Also, with the paper-based records, the doctors on move had limited access to patient data, and the group could not ensure that right medication was delivered to the right patient, at the right time. Thus, the group decided to implement an open source EHR system, WorldVistA, with the goals of minimizing the need for paper records, allowing order entry by the doctors in the system itself, and enabling easy access to patient records. The system was hosted on a private cloud and was

Project: Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementation Project Head: Dr Neena Pahuja, CIO SI/Vendor: Dell International Services

Dr Neena Pahuja CIO

on the type of order e.g. scheduling a radiology investigation, drawing a blood sample and dispatching it, etc. The system’s BCMA workflow links the drug dispensing from pharmacy to the doctors’ orders with the unique barcode on drugs (at the level of generic drug). Bar coded drug is linked to “Right Patient, Right time, Right drug, Right dose” with audit trail record of “who administered the drug”. The application interface allows doctors, pharmacy and nurses to check time of dose and active orders for each drug. The system sends out consults request, consults completion, abnormal lab results and ADT (Admission, Discharge & Transfer) statuses to physicians in real-time and tracks the action taken on these while retaining patient context. It also sends care reminders for regular eye exams, foot exams or Glycosylated Hemoglobin for patients with chronic diseases. Apart from this, the system generates clinical alerts — till date 437 cases of possible drug allergy interaction, 3,2000 cases for checking for duplicate orders, and 21,010 cases of drug interactions have been reported.

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Spatial Agronomy Information System powers NFCL

highlights

Today, 1 CFG grade gets an approval within a period of 11 months, using the data collated through the SAIS application, as compared to the earlier 16–20 month cycle Reduction in the percentage of errors by more than 80 percent Productivity of agronomists has increased by more than 25 percent

database and application server located in the company’s corporate office data center. The remote clients connect to the SAIS Application using a secure WDVPN (Wireless Device Virtual Private Network) connectivity through the use of a data card over the service provider’s CDMA network. The WDVPN connectivity ensures that the end-user of the remote client uses the same Internet pipe of the organization using controlled access with monitoring as per the organization’s Internet usage policy, which ensures a high level protection against spam/viruses. The application allows data entry even in the scenarios when there is no Internet connectivity or unexpected shutdown of the central SAIS application server. With the application, all the recorded information and analysis reports are available in a single spatial location point on Google maps for each recorded data point along with graphical representation by way of bar or pie charts. Earlier, time to have a single view of the data when entered in a post facto mode after the manual data collation was eight days, which has now been reduced to one day. By automating its data recording processes, the company has drastically brought down the percentage of errors by more than 80 percent when compared to the manual mode. Today, the company has access to consistent, Company: Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals

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agarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals Ltd (NFCL), one of the largest plant nutrition companies in the Indian market, has been a strong proponent towards having a balanced nutrient usage based on the crop and soil, through Customized Fertilizer Grade (CFG) solutions. To determine the right CFG solutions for a specific cropregion-soil combination, the company had to carry out an extensive process that involved carrying out thousands of trials across the country on various crops and different soil types with different climatic and water availability conditions. It also had to derive macro and micro-economic crop yield increase. After the company arrived at the right grade of CFG solutions for a specific crop-region-soil combination, it had to take the government approval before releasing it for commercial use to the farmers. To simplify the process, the company’s in-house team developed a Spatial Agronomy Information System (SAIS) Web Application, and a GIS & GPS integrated application with Oracle as the database. The application is based on a client-server architecture model, which allows agronomists to enter data from the client-end using netbooks. It enables seamless data transfer from the remote mobile clients situated in the far-flung interior rural markets of India to the Central SAIS

Project: Spatial Agronomy Information System (SAIS) Web Application implementation Project head: V Srinivas, CIO

V Srinivas CIO

accurate and reliable data collected in the field, which has greatly enhanced the ability of the decision makers in identifying key constraints to increasing crop productivity. Also, the detailed and documented information including the spatial data is available at the same cost as in the manual mode. In the pre-implementation scenario, the agronomists had to devote a major portion of their time on documenting their day-to-day activities manually. This also resulted in lesser number of field trials actually carried out per agronomist, per year. With the implementation of the SAIS application, the employee productivity has gone up by around 25 percent on account of increase in the number of field trial plots per employee. The automation of the relevant data including the spatial data through the SAIS application has enabled NFCL to get faster approvals, which enables it to launch its product for a particular region about 1 year or 2 crop seasons ahead of the competition, which translates into a market share of 100 percent for this CFG product.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 43

silver edge

Advanced analytics enables SBI to take better decisions

highlights

The bank has been able to generate 78,759 leads (9.56 percent growth over the last year) and convert 9,374 leads (39.87 percent growth over the last year) It generated revenue worth ` 375.64 crore, with nearly 27 percent growth from 2011 It reached out to 3.78 crore customers through 163 campaigns

informationweek october 2012

management, and ATM operations and strategy. Bank branches and controllers also have access to single view of data integrated from the different sources. These insights are being utilized by different business units for reviewing performance of various products across categories, locations, branches and customer profiles. This in turn is helping the bank to adopt a more focused approach towards targeting specific customer segments and locations for product promotions/campaigns and launch of customized products and services. The bank is also able to provide important BI dashboards on smartphones and iPads, which enables top executives to review performances of various activities and take real-time decisions, even while travelling. As a part of the project, the bank has integrated the Lead Management System with its existing CRM system UNICA, where customer interactions are recorded, traced and tagged. This helps the bank in designing more efficient target campaigns, marketing new products and services and converting the prospect into a valuable customer. Apart from this, significant shift from branch transactions to alternate channel transactions as a result of effective marketing and campaigning activities, has resulted in considerable cost reduction for the bank. By using CRM analytics for targeted Company: State Bank of India

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tate Bank of India has more than 18 crore customers who bank with over 15,000 branches. Given its vast size and presence in 32 countries, the business data of the bank was spread over several domestic and international source systems like core banking (domestic and international), trade finance, treasury (domestic and international), ATMs, Internet banking, mobile banking, payment systems, etc. Each system in turn had huge number of customer accounts and very high transaction volumes. In order to resolve this issue and integrate the data from diverse sources into timely and reliable actionable information, the bank undertook the SBI Data Warehouse Project. The objective of the bank was two-fold — it wanted to offer timely information to the top management and decision makers so that they can analyze it and take appropriate decisions, and it wanted to perform data mining or analytics over such huge data sets available. Thus, the bank deployed BI and advanced analytical tools like IBM Cognos, UNICA Campaign Management, SPSS Modeler, Intelligent Miner and Open Pages on the IBM platform. The project has enabled the bank to use predictive analytics for several business areas, including credit risk management, operational risk

Project: SBI Data Warehouse Project Project Head: N. Jambunathan, Chief General Manager (IT)

N. Jambunathan

Chief General Manager (IT)

campaigns, the bank is able to convert more leads, resulting in substantial increase in revenues. Based on the insights from Debit Cards - POS transactions analytics, the bank can take decisions for improving market share by formulating strategies for promoting cards more effectively to prospective customers, devising effective loyalty reward points for customer retention, and formulating region-specific reward programs and merchant tie-ups. Also, ATM analytics has enabled the bank to better position its ATMs across the country, which has helped the bank to attract more customers, resulting in the increase in the bank’s earnings and reduction in operating cost. With the use of efficient BI reporting and analytics, SBI has launched various sorts of online banking, mobile banking and ATM services, which has enabled it to acquire new customers. It also has effective grievance redressal and complaints resolution mechanism in place for its existing customers across business lines. Apart from this, it can perform trend analysis to observe customer attrition and churn and devise strategies accordingly.

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RFID helps Sheela Foam curb unauthorized dealer selling

s one of the largest manufacturers of mattresses, Sheela Foam was facing a serious and critical problem due to selling by unauthorized dealers. Typically, unauthorized dealers increased the customer footfalls by keeping ‘Sleepwell’ products, but they would try to convert the customer to some other brand or local product by talking negative about Sleepwell or by offering heavy discounts on Sleepwell products to spoil product selling by the authorized dealers. Overall, this created a negative brand image in a customer’s mind, which resulted in sale loss and created dissatisfaction amongst authorized dealers. Many structured surveys and feedback had established that the firm annually lost around 5–7 percent of its sales due to a customer moving to other brand through a dealer’s influence. The firm had absolutely no control over an unauthorized dealer and their numbers were also huge. Although, Sheela Foam used MRP labels, which carried unique product serial numbers, the unauthorized dealer tampered with the label making it impossible to track the source of the supply. Mystery customers sent by the firm to check whether its products were kept at unauthorized dealers faced a huge challenge in finding out the product’s

serial number without buying the product. On purchase, it was generally found that the MRP label was tampered with, which defeated the purpose of the exercise. The firm wanted a solution that could help it in tracing the product supply source for an unauthorized dealer. To resolve this issue, the firm placed RFID tags inside the mattress — these tags enable a mystery customer to locate the product in an unauthorized dealer shop and find out the supply source. Each product contains the RFID and MRP label which has a unique product serial number. The movement of every product is fully recorded from the factory to the distributor and from the distributor to the dealer. Today, a mystery customer can visit an unauthorized dealer with an RFID reader and can instantly know that whether the unauthorized dealer has Sleepwell products in his shop. The unique product serial number gets collected in the RFID reader automatically. Once the serial numbers are collected, the dispatch history of the product movement can then be known very easily. The product supply source i.e. distributor or the dealer who has sold the product to an unauthorized dealer can easily be identified. As a result, product traceability at an Company: Sheela Foam

Long-term product traceability as RFID tags are embedded within products Ability to track product supply source and removing fraudulent dealers

snapshot

highlights

Increased topline by ` 25 crore and bottomline by ` 3.75 crore

Project: Curbing selling by unauthorized dealers using RFID Project Head: Pertisth Mankotia, Head-IT

Pertisth Mankotia Head-IT

unauthorized dealer shop has become extremely simple and easy. Earlier, the company spent ` 50–70 lakh per annum on the purchase of its own Sleepwell product through mystery customer from an unauthorized dealer shop — this is no longer required post the usage of RFID tags. Sheela Foam’s business requires products to be tracked and traced as its products offer a guarantee of 10-15 years. A customer generally loses the invoice and the product guarantee card, resulting in no traceability regarding the product age. However, now with the use of RFID, the firm has built long period product age traceability, which is extremely useful for the customer complaint management team. In the firm’s product segment, the most important thing is to keep the dealer motivated and satisfied. Unauthorized dealers selling the product, not only impacted the sales but also reduced the authorized dealer’s motivation level. This solution has helped Sheela Foam to overcome the issue in a comprehensive manner.

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 45

silver edge

TVS Motors takes dealer relationship to a new level

was a herculean task. The sales staff used to call dealers and get the sales numbers, which was then sent to the headquarters for compiling. A huge amount of time and effort was spent in getting the sales numbers. Today, this solution with modules for sales, service, spares and accounting is used by the dealer for running the day-to-day business. At the end of the day, all relevant data gets replicated at the headquarters. This enables TVS Motors to get information on dealership performance in addition to information related to secondary sales and service. The logistics team also has the visibility of the dealer stock, which enables it to plan their dispatches based on requirements. This has helped in improving the working capital management of the dealer. Information related to sales and service is now available to all sales and service staff at their fingertips. As a result, the sales team spends more time with customers and less in collating data for reporting. Keeping in mind the fact that the dealership network is spread across India with varying connectivity needs, the firm decided to design a solution that could work in an offline mode and then synchronize the relevant information to a centralized database. Company: TVS Motors

Service level for after-sales spares parts has improved from 78 percent to 90 percent Reduction of average inventory from 15 days of stock to 7 days of stock Annual saving per dealer amounts to ` 1.3 lakh

informationweek october 2012

snapshot

highlights

or any company in the automotive sector, secondary sales information is critical to the success of the business. As dealers are the first touchpoints to customers, TVS Motors felt an acute need to standardize the processes at the dealer level to provide a better customer experience. Understanding customers, showing responsiveness to product complaints and improving the supply chain efficiency was a part of TVS Motors’ long-term plan. Standardization, transparency and improving operational efficiency was essential to take the firm to that goal. As part of this initiative, the firm decided to design and develop a solution for dealers named as ‘Dealership Management System’ (DMS), which was aimed at helping dealers in managing the business, while bringing visibility for TVS Motors on all activities at the dealership retail outlet. While designing the system, the firm decided to incorporate all the best practices that it wanted the dealer to follow. The solution was also equipped with many actionable reports that could be used by dealers to improve their bottomline. Before the implementation, getting secondary sales numbers and information about products

Project: Dealer Management System Project Head: TG Dhandapani, CIO

TG Dhandapani CIO

This has enabled the dealers to operate independently. This has also helped in de-risking the dealer from connectivity related challenges. The data transfer between the dealer location and the central database is seamless and does not require any additional effort on both sides A replenishment system between the dealer and TVS Motors reduced the average inventory from 15 days of stock to seven days of stock. The ROI for the dealer management system has exceeded expectations. The annual saving per dealer amounts to ` 1.3 lakh; if one calculates the total for 600 dealers, the annual savings come to approximately ` 7.8 crore. There also been a marked improvement in quality of service. Post deployment of the system, the customer satisfaction index has improved from 740 to 780. It has also been able to improve service level for after-sales spares parts from 78 percent to 90 percent. Apart from this, the firm has been able to reduce the number of repeat jobs from 8 percent to 3 percent.

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BI/Analytics

48 to 52

Enterprise Applications

54 to 63

Security

64 to 67

Social

70 to 71

Mobility

72 to 73

Cloud Computing

74 to 75

Virtualization

76 to 78

General IT

80 to 90

Storage/DCP/BR

92 to 95

Data Center/ Networking

96 to 98

Unified Communications/ Videoconferencing/ Enterprise Communications Document Management/MPS Open Source

99 to 101 102 to 103 104

october 2012 2011 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 47

BI/Analytics

BI improves customer service

utual fund companies in general are facing different issues based on their structure, products, target customer segments, etc. Yet, problems related to data remains largely common to all of them. Major issues include data cleansing and systematic representation of correct data. Axis Asset Management Company was also facing similar challenges because of which it embarked on a BI initiative. The project has provided a reliable foundation for

snapshot Company: Axis Asset Management Company Project: 1KEY BI & Data Warehouse Project Project Head: Tejas Shah, VPâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT SI/Vendor: MAIA Intelligence

C-level executives to make better strategic decisions, along with helping middle-level managers make quicker operational decisions. The earlier scenario was cumbersome and time consuming as it involved the usage of a typical Excel file to make dashboards and KPI reports, which required data to be gathered from various sources and put it together. Today, the BI solution has automated the process of fetching data from various files. With the BI solution, the marketing department is able to generate reports of customers whose policy is about to expire. Customers are communicated on the status, renewal and new product information. The HR department is able to save significant amount of time using the sales performance report for incentive calculation and performance and annual appraisal processes.

BI helps Biostadt improve performance

hile biotechnology firm, Biostadt had a two-year SAP implementation, it was looking for comprehensive reporting tools that would help the firm identify problems by drilling down to exact details. It wanted a solution that would help it in streamlining its reporting mechanism. For example, in review meetings, every unit head used to present the facts and figures but these were related to his unit only. After evaluating several solutions in the market, the firm chose 1KEY Agile

snapshot Company: Biostadt Project: Implementation of BI Project Head: Sunil Kolambkar, GM â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Information Services SI/Vendor: MAIA Intelligence

informationweek october 2012

solution from MAIA as its BI tool. Post deployment, reports for all business units are visible and comparable with figures for the last year. Due to the solution, the firm is able to present reports as required by the management in the form of KPIs and dashboards. As information can be seen visually, and reports are interactive in nature, the management can see which region or territory has performance issues. For example, due to the solution, the firm could detect a territory that has been underperforming in collection. The firm has also been able to find products with negative trends within specific markets. This led the firm to change the product mix and place products appropriately. Overall, this has not only helped the firm in reducing the inventory, but also in planning the production more accurately as per demand.

Self-service BI helps Infosys ramp up efficiency

nformation Systems department, which forms the IT backbone of Infosys, currently supports more than 200 web applications across business functions to help employees carry out their day-to-day operations. The volume of data that is being fed into these applications by a 150,000 plus workforce is humongous and at the same time has the potential for being a goldmine for giving indications of how effectivelyand efficiently the organization operates, and how it can be further optimized. However, there were challenges in accessing data of this volume. To address this need, the Infy yDyD (your data your decision) project was launched, where a user friendly query building interface along with role-based dashboards and widgets were enabled and rolled out to end-users. The solution provides faster turnaround times on such report requirements to enable decision making, as well as allows sharing of such reports and scorecard solutions across various user groups. The solution brings important business information to the user, without the user having to browse through multiple apps. Today, 18 different solutions have been created for users to create their own reports, through self-servicing. Also, 55 organizational metrics have been standardized, signed off by process owners and enabled through enterprise metric dashboards. Cost savings due to self-service reporting is estimated to be ` 22.31 crore.

snapshot Company: Infosys Project: Infy yDyD (your data your decision) Project Head: Venkatesh Subramanya, Delivery Manger, BI, Information Systems

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Digital Oil Field powers Cairn India

airn India was facing challenges in obtaining a real-time total asset awareness, as well as process control of its oil fields. This was done manually by relying on data entry and Excel-based reporting, which was not only errorprone, but also didn’t provide any data that could be mined for any arising problem. To address this challenge, the company adopted the concept of Digital Oil Field (DOF), which is a suite of interactive and complementary

snapshot Company: Cairn India Project: Adoption of Digital Oil Field Concept Project Head: Priya Narayanan, DGM – Information Services

technologies that provide realtime total asset awareness. All the information acquired from various sources is combined and presented via graphs, KPIs, tables, maps, and composite views in mashups. Post implementation, the DOF system provides one place where various consumers of information can contextually access the information they need linked to the underlying data stores. The system enables continuous monitoring of wells, allowing employees to catch hazards before they become a problem and allow easier predictive maintenance. Integration of real-time technology with predictive mode is providing Cairn the ability to better optimize its assets performance. Post deployment, Cairn has reduced man-hours for daily report preparation by 80 percent.

Essar gets a bird’s eye view of business

hen the business operates in a wide array of sectors and sub-sectors, it becomes complex to monitor KPIs for the entire operation. Essar Projects was in a similar situation and was finding it extremely difficult to manage KPIs. KPI figures had to be derived after running through several reports. A single view of the operational and financial truth, across the enterprise was tedious and time consuming. This made benchmarking against actual values and industry peers extremely cumbersome.

snapshot Company: Essar Projects Project: Business dashboard Project Head: Srinivas Tata, CIO

Too much information was lost in the transition between data analysis and presentation. After evaluating several dashboard solutions, the firm chose SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Xcelsius because it could deliver realtime performance data into a visually intuitive and interactive dashboard. Seven dashboards were integrated over MIS, i.e. CEO, finance, business development, human resources, health, safety and environment, equipment/asset utilization, and maintenance and risk analysis. The dashboards can be filtered for the various SBUs, geography and customer types. Today, dashboards give a clear picture of the overall business parameters in a few screens. The firm has also benefited from improved business agility and competitive advantage by increasing the ability of the management to interpret data quickly and effectively.

Idea Cellular uses BI to better target customers

n order to maximize revenues from its current prepaid base, Idea Cellular implemented Increase Revenue through Intelligence in Segmentation (IRIS) program, which is an end-to -end customer life cycle management framework focused on microsegmentation. As part of the program, the company prepared a campaign management data mart from a business data warehouse across 400 odd variables including usage, recharge and demographic variables. This data is used by campaign designers across various circles to design campaigns by doing microsegmentation. The company is able to divide each circle into nearly 100 micro-segments. It can launch targeted segment campaigns using data like customer’s preferred language and preferred time slot. The company can also do post launch campaign evaluation, which provides a wealth of campaign data — campaign library with results of over 1,600+ offers from post ROI results is available. Idea has achieved 2 – 3 percent incremental revenue uplift over eligible prepaid base for IRIS circles. The company has been able to reduce time to market from 4 days to 2 days. Similarly, end-to-end configuration and ongoing activities during the campaign life cycle have reduced from 10 days to 1.5 days for a campaign cycle of 15 days.

snapshot Company: Idea Cellular Project: Increase Revenue through Intelligence in Segmentation (IRIS) Project head: Prakash Paranjape, CIO SI/Vendor: IBM India

october 2012 i n f o r m at i o n w e e k 49

BI/Analytics

BI improves business visibility

or Indiabulls Technology Solutions, the source of business data was available in two or more different applications/databases. The process of data gathering from various applications was manual. The firm felt the need to increase the velocity in which it was able to deliver information from the transactional systems to the business user and analyst communities. The firm wanted to provide the business community with relevant tools to analyze the

snapshot Company: Indiabulls Technology Solutions Project: BI Implementation Project Head: Sameer Khanna, VP SI/Vendor: MAIA Intelligence

data for themselves, thus freeing up IT resources to pursue more strategic technical initiatives. Using MAIA Intelligence’s 1 Key BI solution, the firm created a data mart that would allow the business and analyst communities to use Microsoft Excel to create their own reports, thus moving the tools into the hands of end users. Microsoft Analysis Services Cubes were used to create a data repository. This gave the firm the ability to quickly create various reports by simply ‘dragging and dropping’ columns into a spreadsheet. Further, they were able to slice and dice and filter the data through various dimensions defined within the cube. Post deployment, the firm has improved its ability to make quick decisions using a dashboard based on real-time data at various levels of business users.

Bank enhances reporting efficiency

otak Mahindra Bank was looking for a solution to streamline its business processes and transform corporate data into high-value information. In order to meet its reporting needs, the Bank decided to implement a BI Solution with Data Warehouse. In line with its objective, the Bank first built a data warehouse for its credit card operations and then implemented 1KEY BI Suite. The implementation went smoothly and was completed in 4 months, enabling the bank to save an estimated 3-4 times the cost of

snapshot Company: Kotak Mahindra Bank Project: bi & Data Warehousing Project Project head: Sanjay Gupta, Executive Vice President - IT Si/Vendor: MAIA Intelligence

informationweek october 2012

implementing any alternate solution. Post implementation of the BI solution, the Bank can assess business by means of understanding the trends in the customer acquisition, credit policy, portfolio management, and collections and recovery areas. Based on transaction analysis, the bank is able to give service- and quality-related calls and collect feedback. The data reporting and visualization tools have enabled automated scheduled generation and delivery of reports to end users. The Bank can now access highvalue information at the point of need, which in turn provides it with in-depth insights and supports better decision making. Post deployment, the Bank has observed an improvement in reporting efficiency by 50 percent, while employee productivity has increased by 30 percent. Additionally, it has been able to reduce costs by 20 percent.

M&M enhances supply chain effectiveness

upply chain and logistic issues are one of the major challenges faced by organizations in the automotive industry where delay in procurement and receipt of any part can cause production losses and dead inventory to the tune of several hundred crores. In order to enhance supply chain effectiveness, M&M Auto Sector embarked on a project to reduce supply chain trauma by de-coupling supplies from production with the help of Dynamic Buffer Management (DBM) technique of TOC (theory of constraint). Since there was no readymade standard solution in SAP for DBM, the company’s in-house team developed and implemented a solution. The group synchronized three different systems ECC, SAP-SCM and BI in the solution. The solution has the capability of total parameterization at a user level, which allows real-time changes to be made in business scenarios. The solution has the ability to generate illustrative dashboards at the front-end using complex validation at the backend. Today, the company has a single dashboard to depict system inventory status, which leads to transparency in coverage and inventory reports. Close monitoring of selected parts and their inventory using DBM report has resulted in an overall improvement in the visibility of stock parts and the related costs. Any change made in the master data of the solution is reflected in subsequent reports, which results in standardization of reports.

snapshot Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (Automotive & Farm Sectors) Project: Dynamic Buffer Management through SAP BW Project head: Bishwanath Ghosh, VP - IT & KM

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Information warehouse slashes costs

ommodity buying plays a very big role in determining the bottom line of Marico, as about 60-70 percent of the total cost of finished goods is commodity related. To improve the profitability of the company, Marico realized the need for streamlining the processes of commodity buying. Accordingly, the ‘Buying Information Warehouse’ was created to enhance the capability of the commodities buying team towards making better buying decisions. This

snapshot Company: Marico Project: Information warehouse for commodities Project Head: Girish Rao, Head-IT

warehouse integrates several different data sources like SAP, web applications and other information sources to provide a seamlessly integrated set of information. Prior to this warehouse, availability of information regarding the factors influencing decision making – Rate, Quantity and Performance — was a major challenge. With the development of the warehouse, the team had a single authentic source of information. The work earlier done by the team in crunching and organizing the numbers was done by smart routines. The central server also acted as an archive to store historical information about the way markets performed across periods. Today, a single person can replace the effort of 2-3 compilers. Since reports are standardized, a buyer can focus more on buying rather than number crunching.

Data warehouse boosts productivity

ax Bupa Health Insurance, was facing a huge challenge in aggregating fragmented data from multiple applications. As a result, business analysts used to take approximately six-seven days to extract and consolidate data with meaningful information. To improve business insights, the firm wanted to enable a self-service capability, so that every function could look at pre-designed and personalized dashboards. Max Bupa Health Insurance partnered with Genpact,

snapshot Company: Max Bupa Health Insurance Project: Data Warehouse Project Head: Irvinder Singh Lail, Corporate Initiatives Head SI/Vendor: Genpact

which proposed a Data Warehouse solution. The objective was to capture the life cycle of a policy starting from lead generation till policy expiration, including claims and underwriting. Today, the implementation has given the firm insights into profitability of products by relating policy and premium information to the claims burden. The firm can calculate earned premium and loss ratio for any period, analyze renewal percentage, drill down to premium, and target demographic markets. This has helped the firm in achieving a growth of 59 percent (Gross Written Premium) in H1 12 vs. H2 11, and 63 percent (No. of Lives) during the same period. It registered 25 percent gain in productivity. Multidimensional analytics of claims has helped in identifying high cost areas, which resulted in cost optimization of 2 percent on claims ratios (approximately valued at ` 2 crore).

Analytics solves complex data gathering

an India Food Solutions (Blue Foods) is one of India’s leading restaurant chains, operating over 100 outlets through a mix of own and franchise operations. When the retail concept in hospitality started picking up, more consolidated data was required for business need. So every night data from POS units at 250 outlets was transferred to the HO and manually updated in the back-office application— the process took sixseven hours. As the number of outlets increased, the time taken for the warehousing process took longer. To address these issues, the firm chose MAIA Intelligence’s 1KEY Agile BI Suite product. The solution gives a clear picture of products in terms of sales and procurement. It also helps the firm to analyze which products are selling and producing better revenues. Today, the complete data warehouse update process does not take more than 30 minutes. Accurate reports are available sooner, thereby enabling senior management to make crucial decisions quickly. Reports are made available with options like drill down, charts, and dashboards — with the inclusion of user security. Outlets are now monitored very closely with accurate and authenticated information. With BI, users can compare the information across outlets and periods.

snapshot Company: Pan India Food Solutions Project: Deploying 1KEY Agile BI Suite Project Head: Siddharth Laskar, Head IT SI/Vendor: S & S InfoTech and Software

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BI/Analytics

Performance App improves visibility

nfosys has internally developed a bespoke application for performance management with the objectives of helping employees progress towards achievement of superior standards of work performance, and in identifying the knowledge and skills required for performing their jobs efficiently. The application promotes visibility of goals across the organization, and ensures accountability as assignment of measurable and clearly articulated goals is captured in the system. It provides

snapshot Company: Infosys Project: Performance Management System Project Head: Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, VP and Group Head, Information Systems

employees a better understanding on their contribution and its alignment with the strategic objectives of the organization. Previously, one of the major challenges that the appraiser used to face was to compare appraisal data for his appraisee. BI was used and was integrated with the application to enable the appraiser to compare his teamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s performance on various parameters. This enabled the manager to take quick decisions. The application supports multiple workflows, allowing many variants of appraisal for different employee grades and job roles. Multiple pre-configured templates allow starting the appraisal process within a few days of the decision to implement the cycle. This has helped in achieving 10 percent cost savings in HR operations and improved operational excellence and expenditure reduction.

Usha harnesses the power of analytics

sha International Limited (UIL) deployed a BI (Business Intelligence) tool sometime ago, but the adoption was low because of performance challenges. Users were frustrated with the slow response to a large data analysis query. To enhance performance across these areas, the company was looking for a system that offered real-time predictive analysis. UIL also wanted to improve the ability to respond to market dynamics and enable the decision-making process by complex

snapshot Company: Usha International Project: SAP HANA for BI Project Head: Subodh Dubey, Sr. Vice President & Group CIO

informationweek october 2012

run-time data analysis and simulation. UIL chose the SAP HANA platform for BI, using in-memory technology. This solution can query multiple types of data sources in real-time, with unprecedented speed and volume. After implementation, UIL now has the ability to respond to market dynamics through predictive and realtime analysis. The system has changed the way data is stored and analyzed within the organization. The system has reduced the time to process business data from hours to seconds and with a higher level of granularity. This has improved UILâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forecasting abilities. Today, UIL has better inventory controls, which has resulted in the reduction of surplus inventory worth ` 22 crore. The solution has also translated into average time saving of 100 minutes per user, per day, which in turn has led to 50 percent time saving for the BI administration team.

YES BANK says yes to customer income analytics

ES BANK embarked on a project on funds transfer pricing and customer income analytics. This enables the financial analytics team to transfer price of each product across the Bank on a daily basis, analyze the daily income, generate various critical MIS, and come out with analytics on-demand from various business units of the Bank. These analytics earlier were not possible due to various reasons like unavailability of the latest data, limitation of spreadsheets used (MS Excel) for data processing and inability to churn out or work on large sets of data. This project has enabled their business teams to garner new insights into their portfolio. The entire solution has been conceptualized and built in-house by the technology team of YES BANK on existing hardware spare capacity. Since there were multiple sources of the data, they were received at different times of the day and were inconsistent with each other. It required two-three people just for data collection and then performing basic data cleansing and validation processes manually on a daily basis. Today, employees can utilize their time better in generating analytics. Earlier, as this process was manual, it was risk prone, leading to manual errors and hence incorrect analysis. This led to rework on MIS when the errors were pointed once they were published. Now, only one person can do all the work in an automated environment with just a click of a button.

snapshot Company: YES BANK Project: Funds transfer pricing and customer income analytics Project Head: Amit Sethi, CIO

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Enterprise Applications

HRMS enables workforce management Clinigene deploys Watson LIMS with manual processes in place, there harat Forge is the flagship

company of the USD 2.5 billion Kalyani Group, which has a workforce of 10,000 people around 14 locations. Being an old business house, companies within the Group had various payroll and time attendance systems. Also, its HR departments relied extensively on forms, spreadsheets and manual processes. This in turn resulted in inefficiencies in the overall workforce management process. Apart from this,

snapshot Company: Bharat Forge Limited (Kalyani Group of companies) Project: HRMS solution Project Head: Yogesh Zope, Group CIO

was a constant threat to data integrity and security. In order to address these issues, the company decided to use integrated HRMS solution. The objective of this project was to remove manual intervention wherever possible and create total transparency. Post deployment, with the eradication of manual paper-based process, there has been an increase in overall efficiency in managing workforce â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the time spent by employees on papers has reduced by 85 percent. Also, time spent on payroll reconciliation has reduced by 85 percent, while time required for appraisal forms processing has reduced by 75 percent. The solution has also eliminated absenteeism information leakage, which has enabled the company to prevent financial losses of at least ` 45 lakh.

Chettinad improves ALM processes

hettinad Cements, a leading manufacturer of cement and construction materials, wanted to increase efficiency in its Asset Life Cycle Management (ALM) processes. Thus, the company implemented inCisEAM (Enterprise Asset Maintenance Lifecycle Management) solution. Post deployment, the company has been able to shift its focus from maintenance recording to maintenance planning, helping decision makers at all levels to understand the status of life critical assets, testing equipment, as well as the

snapshot Company:Chettinad Cements Project: Improving asset life cycle management Project Head: Kodiyarasu P, Additional General Manager (IT) SI/Vendor: C2IL

informationweek october 2012

availability of personnel responsible for the end-to-end maintenance process. The expanded inCiseEAMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s functionality enabled Chettinad Cement to share maintenance data from different plantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; geographically separated operations, covering several square miles of quarries and the cement production plant. With the help of EAM, Chettinad Cements has been able to improve warehouse productivity, ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, improve regulatory/safety compliance, and enhance work planning/coordination. The deployment of the solution has led to improvement in labor utilization by 10-20 percent and asset utilization by 3-5 percent. It has increased planned maintenance by 50-80 percent, while new equipment purchases have come down by 3-5 percent. In addition, the company has improved lost warranty recoveries by 10-50 percent.

linigene International is a full-service Clinical Research Organization that partners with global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in their clinical development programs. The company was facing major challenges with its in-house Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), which only had very basic functionalities and could not deliver the highly accurate, world class system meeting the regulatory compliance standards which the clients demanded. This in turn limited the company from getting enough projects. To tackle this issue, Clinigene deployed Watson LIMS in its BioAnalytical Laboratory, which went live in November 2011. Watson LIMS is compliant with GCP (Good Clinical Practices) and GLP (Good Laboratory Practices) standards, which are de facto standards in CRO (Contract Research Organization) industry across the globe. Post deployment, the company has overcome challenges linked to manual sample handling, processing and traceability, which has accelerated the sample turnaround time. With the solution, the sample analysis capability has increased by 100 percent from 50,000 samples per year to 100,000 samples, with the same manpower. The company has already recovered the cost of the solution with the first project awarded to the bio-analytical lab in range of ` 3 crore. In addition, Clinigene expects revenue generation from bio-analytical services to grow by 50 percent.

snapshot Company: Clinigene International Project: Deployment of Watson LIMS Project Head: Ajit Manocha, Executive General Manager

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DIESL implements OTM

rive India Enterprise Solutions Ltd., (DIESL), a TATA group company, is a leading provider of integrated logistics solutions, with over 165 warehouses connecting 7,000 towns across India. The company was facing challenges with inefficiencies in its processes of primary and secondary distribution and international logistic services, which was done either manually or as a semi-automated process. This led to delays, revenue leakages and customer dissatisfaction.

snapshot Company: DIESL Project: Oracle Transportation Management implementation Project Head: Shirish Gariba, CIO

To resolve these challenges, DIESL implemented Oracle Transportation Management (OTM Ver. 6.2.4), which is built on a 3-tier architecture i.e. webserver, application-server and databaseserver. The application is accessible through both intranet and Internet. OTM implementation helped in end-to-end tracking of the consignments, plugging of revenue leakages, and robust planning of rates and routes. As the time required by the user to handle an order has drastically reduced, orders processed per user have gone up. It has enabled timely customer billing and collection of customer payments, as well as timely vendor payments due to faster validation of vendor invoices. The implementation has enabled DIESL to reduce transport cost by 5 percent, order cycle time by one day and operational expenditure by 8 percent.

CRM improves efficiency of sales team

leading financial services firm, DSP BlackRock Investment Managers, wanted to improve the efficiency of its sales team by equipping them with better insights into customer buying patterns. In line with this objective, the firm decided to implement a CRM system to automate this process and improve sales productivity. Post implementation, the sales team can focus on targeted customers across the sector to generate potential leads and manage the customer life cycle in a better way. The firm can track

snapshot Company: DSP BlackRock Investment Managers Project: Implementation of CRM Project Head: Srinibash Sahoo, Senior VP & Head – Technology

all activities and interactions of the sales staff with every customer and distributor. Further, key performance indicators at the levels of relationship manager, branch manager, and zonal heads can be monitored using pre-built dashboards. The firm also uses this platform to host multiple contests for different zones, states and branches. This is used to measure the target versus achievements of sales staff. Reports and dashboards are used by the sales team to generate potential leads, and in identifying opportunities for cross-selling and improving customer retention. CRM also enables capturing high value transactions at all branches. As a result, detailed reports can be used by fund managers and the sales team to decide the investment strategy. Further, dashboards can be mapped to Google maps for geographical and geospatial information.

Essar saves huge costs with Oracle upgrade

he Essar Group has a global footprint that spans different continents. The geographical spread of its businesses and the diversity of technology platforms posed a challenge. There were more than 100 Oracle 10g databases to be upgraded. The Group needed to upgrade to Oracle Database 11g to improve the processing speed of its ERP applications across its 2,000 diverse business units. It also wanted to reduce database administration and storage costs, and gain automatic failover capabilities to protect against unnecessary system downtime. The upgrade to Oracle Database 11g was completed in nine hours for each Oracle instance, with minimal impact to the organization’s business units. Upgrade has resulted in savings of an expected USD 609,000 on storage and hardware costs and mission critical system performance has improved by a factor of 10. Post upgrade, DBA and developer productivity has doubled. It has also eliminated idle redundancy in the data center. In addition, the Group has now simplified its overall IT software portfolio. It expects savings of ` 9 crore over the next five years due to savings in the AMC fees (5.4 percent) of the total cost of the databases. It also anticipates reduction of USD 325,000 over five years in the cost of running the organization’s core ERP applications on Oracle Database 11g.

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: Upgrade to Oracle Database 11g Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, Chief Technology Officer

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Enterprise Applications

Godrej minimizes plant downtime

odrej Industries, India’s leading manufacturer of oleochemicals, was facing issues with manual systems in use for monitoring preventive and breakdown maintenance activities. The cost of monitoring and controlling of maintenance was high in absence of real-time data. It was also facing an issue with inventory management with the present inventory of engineering item spares worth nearly ` 11 crore. In order to resolve these issues, Godrej Industries implemented SAP

snapshot Company: Godrej Industries Project: Implementation of SAP Plant Maintenance Project head: Shailesh Joshi, VP (Information Systems)

Plant Maintenance Module and integrated it with other modules, such as finance and control, materials management, asset management, etc. This has enabled the company to access real-time data on plant wise/function wise/equipment wise maintenance cost, which can be utilized for maintenance budget planning, inventory management and effective decision making. This data can also be used to analyze root cause of breakdowns. Post deployment, the company has been able to reduce breakdowns by 66 percent and plant downtime by 29 percent. It has reduced maintenance cost in Vikhroli plant by 12 percent over the last 3 years to the tune of nearly ` 2 crore. It has gained better visibility of the engineering item inventory between its two factories in Vikhroli and Valia — out of 17,000 engineering item codes, 8,000 item codes became redundant.

LMS slashes training costs

DFC Standard Life Insurance (HDFCSL) is one of India’s leading private life insurance companies. Traditionally, HDFCSL provided classroom training programs for orientation of new hires and new product training for the sales force. However, with this approach the company was not able to reach out in a timely manner to all the necessary locations spread across geographies. To tackle this issue, HDFCSL started evaluating Learning Management Systems (LMS), which would enable

snapshot Company: HDFC Standard Life Insurance Project: Learning Management System Project Head: Thomson Thomas, Senior VP– Business Systems & Technology

informationweek october 2012

the company to move its training and learning programs on the Internet/ Intranet. It chose SumTotal TotalLMS as the learning and development portal on the corporate intranet. This portal can also be accessed through the Internet. The project was christened as ‘Go Online And Learn’ (GOAL). With GOAL, the organization today is able to reach out and ensure coverage of a large number of employees and agents spread across diverse geographical locations across the globe, within the shortest duration. The company reaches out to more than 60,000 agents across more than 450 locations in India. This has improved employee understanding of organization and products, especially in remote locations. Also, the company has been able to save 50 percent on the classroom training costs that was previously incurred by the company.

PACS improves delivery of health care services

induja Hopital’s radiology department was facing many challenges with existing processes. Since radiologists could only report for images in reporting stations attached to console rooms of the machines, consultants depended on patients bringing the films for subsequent follow-up consultations. In case of wear and tear and loss of report, re-printing of radiology films/images was almost impossible. Also, each radiology study took an average of 24 hours to reach the prescribing consultant. In order to resolve these challenges, Hinduja Hospital implemented the Picture Archival and Communication System (PACS) from AGFA, which archives the diagnostic images in a form of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine). The hospital also implemented digital signatures for all radiologists as physical authorization(signature) is not possible on radiology reports. The system has enabled consultants to view the images from real world settings. Since the images are available for retrieval for lifetime of the patient, the problem of patients not bringing their radiology films or losing them is taken care of. Post deployment, turnaround time for reporting has come down from 24 hours to less than six hours. Only essential films are printed, while the entire study is given to patients in the form of CD, resulting in significant savings in the cost of film and their development process.

snapshot Company: Hinduja Hospital Project: Picture Archival and Communication System Project head: Mahesh Shinde, Director – Information Technology

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Hitachi optimizes traceability

itachi Consulting Software Services India had a huge server farm of about 400 servers, 1,600 desktops and 900 laptops. To maintain IT assets in an efficient manner, the firm’s IT team created an asset management system based on open source. The IT team further customized the software to capture all hardware and software information along with employee information like employee ID, project name, etc. The IT team leveraged existing SharePoint servers and

snapshot Company: Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Project: Asset management solution Project Head: Sesanka Pemmaraju, Director – IS and CISO

developed a custom solution to track and maintain laptop list using handheld devices. Bar code scanners with in-house built software clients were deployed at the security main gates to scan incoming and outgoing laptops. Since the solution is web-based, information can be accessed from anywhere within the internal network. Barcode-based laptop tracking has further strengthened physical security and accuracy of asset information. Employee movements are also captured by tagging laptops to the employee IDs in the barcode application. The firm has complete information of a particular asset, which has made significant impact on ROI and CAPEX. It has been able to reduce IT asset management team from 4 dedicated engineers to 1 engineer. As the solution is based on open source, the firm has been able to reduce cost on procuring software license.

eCRM strengthens pre-sales

RH Group of Hotels is India’s only chain of heritage palace-hotels and resorts under private ownership. The group was facing a challenge with data consolidation and generating centralized reports with the manual system currently in place. Thus, the company’s internal IT team developed a web-based centralized eCRM and Sales Force Automation tool. eCRM was further integrated with the Central Reservation System and Revenue Management System) application. Post deployment, the sales force

snapshot Company: HRH Group of Hotels Project name: eCRM and sales force automation tool Project Head: Vijay Choudhary, Dy. General Manager (IT)

has access to a call planner interface (dashboard), which prompts them for follow-ups and alerts them for prescheduled meetings with clients. The solution sends out automated SMSes of sales calls to decision makers for alerts as per the probability-of-closing limits defined. The solution is also integrated with the enterprise mailing system, which enables forwarding of selected sales calls for quick approvals. Today, the management can monitor various pre-sales activities and access probability-index, which helps them to closely monitor the calls with higher probability of business conversions. Since the sales call conversion is directly integrated with the CRS, the Group can track converted and non-converted calls. The solution has enabled savings on account of printing cost, manpower requirements, and reduction in communications cost between operations and sales team.

CRM enhances lead conversion

aton Hydraulics India had limited visibility to the sales opportunities and win/loss information. The reports on status, revenue projections and close dates were inconsistent. Communication among the sales teams consisted of e-mails, spreadsheets, and other forms of information that were difficult to track, consolidate and formalize. The business processes across the hydraulics units at Eaton for the sales and marketing function was available in bits and pieces across different systems and applications. To overcome the challenges, Eaton upgraded its Siebel CRM solution. Today, the firm has the ability to quickly identify opportunities by product line, region and account. There has been a reduction in non-value added time of sales people by 9 percent. The firm expects revenue increase in the range of 2-3 percent and margin increase of 0.5 percent. Eaton has also improved its ability to increase its reach significantly. For example, the total number of opportunities created went up five-folds in the first six months of FY 12 as compared to the last six months of FY 11. More importantly, the win-loss ratio is around 1.5 times of the known opportunities. The firm has already realized ` 30 lakh cost savings through reduction in non-value activities and increased efficiency. It has also realized ` 20 lakh annualized margin growth from sales improvements of 0.5 percent. In totality, the firm has added ` 50 lakh more margin during the first 12 months after deployment.

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: Deployment of CRM Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

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Enterprise Applications

Infosys accelerates productivity

nfosys deals with a number of maintenance-based projects and across each life cycle stage; it also deals with multiple tools with the project management and development happening in multiple locations. From the manager’s point of view, most of the interactions are outside the system and he has limited control over the quality of the deliverables. From the developer’s point of view, the challenge is in the usage of disjointed tools and referring to multiple portals to update the project

snapshot Company: Infosys Project: Application Management Platform Project Head: Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, VP and Group Head, Information Systems

and engineering data. To bring synergy, Infosys decided to build Infosys Application Management Platform (I-AM). The platform integrates processes and project management systems along with relevant engineering tools across life cycle stages. It also provides a plug-and-play architecture to integrate the engineering tools relevant to the project or the client. This gives developer the flexibility to assemble his own delivery platform, with his preferred tools and accelerators. I-AM automates individual and team workflows throughout the application management lifecycle and standardizes processes to reduce the overheads. The platform has also enforced a processdriven approach to life cycle management. It has reduced monitoring and tracking efforts as real-time interactions with the project team are possible through this platform.

K Raheja cuts SAP authorization time

Raheja Corp (KRC) is a diversified business group, which has businesses spanning in the areas of real estate, hospitality and retail. KRC had successfully implemented SAP ERP across business verticals and locations. The company has around 380+ SAP ERP users. However, it was facing key challenges due to frequent transfers of users cross-departments, locations and across business segments as these changes had to be updated in SAP authorization profiles of the users. The company was dealing with frequent

snapshot Company: K Raheja Corp Project: Online SAP authorization portal Project Head: Rahul Vasant Mahajan, Associate Vice President – Information Technology

informationweek october 2012

requests through the tedious process of using Excel templates for creating new SAP IDs, changing profiles or adding/ deleting organization elements. Also, the basis team which handles these requests was facing challenges in educating the users to select proper profile and organization elements. To resolve these issues, the company decided to develop a selfservice portal for users for handling all authorizations, as well as new User ID creation requests. It decided to use SAP NetWeaver platform with Web Dynpro technology and developed a self-service online portal for all employees, wherein they can do all the SAP authorization activities on their own. With the portal, average time for User ID creation has reduced from three-four days to a maximum of one day. Also, average time for changes in authorizations has reduced from one-two days to almost real-time, after final approval.

Reliance powered with PLM solution

eliance Power’s management team was concerned that the existing processes followed were inadequate to support the project execution velocity, and hence an integrated lifecycle system for plant and project setup was envisaged. This project was underatken to address the requirement of Reliance Power in the areas of project and plant lifecycle management. Consequently, Reliance Power implemented a Plant Lifecycle Management (PLM) system based on Dassault Systemes ENOVIA and IBM’s Integrated Plant Lifecycle Management (iPLM) templates. The system has enabled the company to improve operational reliability by providing current and correct information. Earlier, business-critical documents were partly stored in SAP DMS, and partly in other legacy systems including paper-based storage, individual computers, e-mails, etc. Post deployment of the system, the documents are available at a common place. It has enabled the company to develop a logical and standard content folders tree structure. The system has enabled the company to increase operational effectiveness by providing faster and easy access of information to all the authorized users. It has also enabled the company to assure quality adherence with respect to information contents and validity of documents. Today, data retrieval is fast and accurate, which helps the users to take quick decisions.

snapshot Company: Reliance Power Project: Plant Lifecycle Management System Project Head: Sreeram Maddury, VP SI/Vendor: Dassault Systèmes/ IBM

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RJ Corp improves bottomline

J Corp runs bottling plants in India and abroad for PepsiCo. In the soft drinks industry, companies use differential pricing at the distributor level, while keeping the retail price same. However, this can lead to cross-territory infiltration as one distributor who has a price advantage may try to sell the same product at a cheaper rate than the authorized distributor for a region. To resolve this issue, RJ Corp developed a solution that allows it to capture production information of

snapshot Company: RJ Corp Project: Material traceability Project Head: Kamal Karnatak, Group CIO, R J Corp

each individual finished good (case of bottles) using online barcode printers and scanners, and then associating them to handling units. In essence, the system builds a 3-tier linkage between consumer pack (bottle), the retail pack (case) and the handling unit. The entire solution is integrated with back-end SAP ERP. Today, the solution provides complete end-to-end traceability of finished goods. It has eliminated the need of scanning each case during dispatch by 95 percent. This solution has also helped the firm in tracking and minimizing cross-territory infiltration. Total benefit because of fewer penalties from parent company, PepsiCo, is around ` 5 crore per annum. Other benefits like less expiry, better demand management and better inventory management amount to benefits of around ` 1.5 crore per annum.

DIESL deploys Salesforce CRM

rive India Enterprise Solutions Ltd., (DIESL), a TATA group company, is a leading provider of integrated logistics solutions, with over 165 warehouses connecting 7,000 towns across India. One of the major pain points of the company was that all the sales activities were either done on Excel or in the form of some manual records, which made tracking the activity and updating it a cumbersome process. The overall delays and process issues in the whole cycle led to low customer satisfaction index. Thus, DIESL decided to move to

snapshot Company: Drive India Enterprise Solutions Ltd. (DIESL) Project: Salesforce CRM deployment Project Head: Shirish Gariba, CIO, DIESL

cloud-based Salesforce CRM. The sales executives can now connect anytime, anywhere to the CRM with their login credentials using web browsers. Not only has the CRM model reduced the server, database and other storage costs, it has also reduced the administrative charges by routing all the approval processes through the system and by enabling tracking of all the sales transactions. The CRM is also integrated with SAP for retrieving the revenue and sales outstanding, which is drawn as reports in CRM and scheduled automatically to the sales associates to track the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s financial status. Executives are also using Chatter through Salesforce CRM to disseminate information about any new updates and share documents, which in turn has reduced e-mails. With CRM, customer satisfaction index has increased by 90 percent and lead closure time has reduced by six days.

MVML improves quality with unique solution

ahindra Vehicle Manufacturers (MVML) located at Chakan, Pune constitutes the complete manufacturing facility for heavy & light commercial vehicles, SUVs, pick-up vehicles and four wheeler vehicles for domestic and export business. To manage day-to-day operations efficiently and smoothly, the firm follows strict quality management system to produce vehicles first time right. To further improve its quality, the IT team conceived a solution to facilitate the digitization and archival of manufacturing documentation for efficient quality check process. The solution named, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Digital Traveler Card Managementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, is a combination of three technologies, i.e., barcode scanning, document scanning and indexing (archival). With the help of this solution, the hard document (traveler card) is digitized, indexed and stored in the central database for ease of reference, storage and retrieval. The solution has not only eliminated the conventional practices, but also brought improved efficiency in managing the internal and external customer needs. It helped in meeting the regulatory and compliance requirement for ISO, ISMS 27001, OSHAS and Mahindra Quality System standards. With the solution, need for dedicated office premises for storing the physical records on hard documents was eliminated. Also, manpower involved for document management has been reduced to one from three.

snapshot Company: Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) Project: Digital Traveler Card Management Project Head: Avishkar Hate, Deputy Manager

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Enterprise Applications

MTS slashes time to market

he VAS Marketing department of MTS India was facing a number of challenges like longer time to market, high revenue share to application providers, and multiple touchpoints for subscriber to access voice VAS services, etc. With an objective to surmount these challenges, the company deployed Convergent Voice Platform (CVP). Post deployment, time to market has reduced to 15 days from earlier timeframe of three months. There has been an increase in the number of voice

snapshot Company: Sistema Shyam Teleservices, (MTS India) Project: Convergent Voice Platform Project head: Manoj Shrivastava, Director - IT & Head - Integrated Technology and IT Governance

VAS services offered in the market to 35 from 8 earlier, which has enabled the company to achieve 124 percent of the yearly targets. Using subscriberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past history, the company is able to offer those services upfront that are highly browsed by the customer. CVP implementation has resulted in total cost saving of about ` 60 million (one time) for network components by optimum utilization of E1 ports. The implementation has also resulted in savings of about ` 60 million per annum from improved revenue share model with the VAS partners. The Voice VAS contribution has increased from 9 percent to 20 percent of the total VAS revenue (on relative basis) and 5 times on an absolute basis. The company has saved cost of about ` 50 million (OPEX) per annum due to bandwidth optimization as a result of distributed architecture.

SIVA Shipping consolidates apps

IVA Shipping, the shipping arm of SIVA Group, had distributed architecture with no real-time data accessibility across its various branches and locations of operations. Also the company had multiple ERPs (Coda, ShipNet, IMOS, and Tally) in multiple countries with separate applications for accounting and operation. A major challenge was the lack of established workflow between the different functions; manual e-mail communication was used to update various financial entries. This led to

snapshot Company: SIVA Shipping Project: SAP ERP implementation Project Head: Dr Selvam K, Group CIO

informationweek october 2012

several problems like delayed closure of accounting and mismanaged invoices. Also, business reports had to be generated manually and the report consolidation had to be done outside the system. To tackle these challenges, the company decided to replace all the three accounting applications with SAP ERP system. All the packages from the old systems were migrated to the new system and SAP ERP was successfully implemented within six months. The system is currently being accessed using the SIVA Group Private Cloud. Also, IMOS Operations software, which is a unique system for SIVA Shipping operations has been integrated with SAP system to give better controls to SIVA Shipping Finance Team to normalize all financial transactions as per their business needs. Today, SIVA shipping can monitor all transactional activities across the company centrally.

Sterling Metaplast moves to ERP

terling Metaplast India (The Sterling Group) is a distributor of premium and luxury eyewear brand with its presence in several premium retail chains. Distribution of high-end eyewear brands to retail giants required the company to have a smooth transactional channel between its international vendors and Indian retail giants. Import of international brands with a variety of style ranges led to unlimited stock keeping units along with different price lists. However, the legacy systems used by the company couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tackle the increased number of transactions. Also, business decisions suffered due to lack of real-time data and MIS reporting. To tackle this, the company decided to implement Sage 300 ERP. Greytrix, the India-based implementation partner of Sage Software, assisted in implementing the core modules. Greytrix also implemented the TDS module, which specifically caters to taxation needs based on set Indian standards and policies. Also Greytrix Auto, a self-audit add-on was implemented that enables reconciling of bank statements with actual check and deposits. With the new system, the company can obtain MIS in the format they desire. The orders placed are now delivered within a relatively shorter turnaround time. Also, the solution provides sales and customer service representatives with easy web-based access to information about prospects, customers, and products. This optimized the staff productivity and customer satisfaction, reduced training time, and led to closing of more sales.

snapshot Company: Sterling Metaplast India Project: Sage implementation Project Head(s): Amit Parikh, Director - Operations and Jeetu Parikh, Director - Finance SI/Vendor: Greytrix India

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SAP increases warehouse throughput

udarshan Chemical Industries wanted to be one of the top four pigment players in the world by 2013-14. To achieve this goal, the company took several strategic initiatives, one of which was to build an ‘Automated High Bay Warehouse’. The company decided to go for complete wireless warehouse wherein all the pallets and locations were barcoded and SAP-WMS functionality was extended to each warehouse operator on the handheld laser scanners and ter-

snapshot Company: Sudarshan Chemical Industries Project: SAP-WMS project Project Head: Sandeep Mhalgi, Senior Manager – Information Systems

minals. The idea of the SAP-WMS system was to guide all the operators for material movements within the warehouse, ensuring all physical movements within the warehouse were recorded in real time, and allowing optimized utilization of the warehouse resources to deliver the expected throughput. Post SAP-WMS implementation, loading/unloading time for a full container of 20 MT was reduced to 30 minutes from two hours. Throughput per day increased to 90 MT from 67 MT, an increase of 35 percent. Number of warehouse operators reduced to 31 from 47, a 28 percent reduction in manpower. The company has also reduced operator cost to ` 34 lakh from ` 51.50 lakh annually, a cost savingof ` 17.5 lakh/per annum. It has registered reduction in customer complaints by over 90 percent, while employee productivity has gone up by over 100 percent.

Tata AIG improves customer service

nsurance being a highly competitive industry vertical, Tata AIG General Insurance Company’s major business need was improving customer service, increasing customer satisfaction and driving customer loyalty through effective customer needs management. For this, the company decided to implement a robust CRM platform application. This initiative involved deploying an Onyx CRM platform integrated with the proprietary Data Warehouse, and consolidating data from multiple

snapshot Company: Tata AIG General Insurance Project: Onyx CRM deployment Project Head: Atri Chakraborty, National Head – Operations and Systems

sources/systems to create a single view of the customer. Key benefit of the CRM platform is that it facilitates viewing of all customer interactions with the organization in one system across all channels of communication, thus enabling a uniform service experience to customers. The robust in-built workflow management capability of the tool manages the entire customer request life cycle very smoothly. Post CRM implementation, first time resolution has increased from 73.15 percent to 89.8 percent, while average Call handling time has reduced from 6:28 minutes to 5:30 minutes. With the system, the company is able to generate an additional revenue of ` 0.2 million/month through cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

ERP streamlines operations

he Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) best known for the Taj Group of Hotels, had standalone systems for all individual functions and properties. It required considerable effort and cost to consolidate the data and disseminate information. To address this issue, IHCL decided to opt for an ERP system in the form of Oracle Applications e-Business Suite (Oracle Apps). The ERP integrates internal management information across the entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service and customer relationship management. As part of the project, the firm implemented various modules under finance, distribution and HR function. Today, the procurement process is streamlined and integrated. Similarly, other major processes such as inventory management, accounting and reporting are also integrated. The firm is also able to centralize certain operations like collections and ordering; thus the firm has been able to improve its cash flows. This is enabling it to achieve cost reduction targets and better co-ordination among business functions. IHCL is now able to consolidate key information on a single homepage, with one-click access to automated out-of-tolerance notifications, KPIs and reports. Competence and skill gaps can be analyzed by person, job and groups. More importantly, the firm is able to drive a pay for performance culture as guideline matrices can be created to manage compensation policies based on performance ratings and rankings.

snapshot Company: Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) Project: Implementation of ERP Project Head: Khushru Siganporia, Director-IT

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Enterprise Applications

Automation improves order fulfilment

elspun India is part of the USD 3.5 billion Welspun Group, one of the top three home textile manufacturers in the world. The JC Penny (JCP) supply chain, which comprises 1,100 stores in the U.S., wanted Welspun to serve their weekly replenishment orders from India. For that JCP suggested a system from their partner TAL. This system receives and sends EDI for each JCP store, and provides infrastructure setup to make pick and pack carton packing for each store. However, as the cost of the TAL

snapshot Company: Welspun Group Project: Business process automation Project Head: Mukund Prasad, Director -Group HR, Business Transformation & Group CIO

system was very high, Welspun decided to develop its own system in-house. The system automates various processes of order fulfilment. It uses SAP PI and SAP ERP as the key business applications, apart from the RF Scanners. The system has reduced the annual recurring cost by more than 80 percent, with low capital cost. Welspun expects to recover the cost of this system within 20 months of go-live. Earlier, order fulfilment was a major business problem in Welspunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s overseas textile business. Post implementation, the Welspun Global Brand is servicing its customers more efficiently. The entire data related to order processing and delivery is available online to customers. Welspunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s SAP system creates a sales order for each store automatically on a real-time basis. Deliveries are created as per available inventory, and all deliveries are grouped in a group associated with the week.

Wipro consolidates messaging infra

ipro Technologies wanted to migrate and consolidate its entire enterprise messaging infrastructure to achieve the business needs of optimizing TCO, supporting BYOD initiative, and automating and optimizing DR with data for all users as against the traditional dial tonebased disaster recovery approach for e-mail. In line with its objective, Wipro consolidated messaging infrastructure for large user base of 130K+ users from 30+ locations to only five locations with optimized bandwidth and high-speed

snapshot Company: Wipro Technologies Project: Consolidating enterprise messaging infrastructure Project Head: Ramesh Nagarajan, Chief Information Officer

informationweek october 2012

networks for bandwidth replication. The entire project was completed within record time of just four weeks. The consolidation of e-mail infrastructure has helped in reducing the number of servers from 80+ to 40. Within six months of going live, two planned DR activities have been taken up successfully with complete site failover. Earlier, backup tapes had to be exchanged between primary and DR site through courier. With increased availability in primary site and replication to DR site, the backup was shifted to DR site, saving the overhead of couriering the backup tapes. This initiative has resulted in 80 percent reduction in number of disk used in the storage, 50 percent reduction in rack space and 60 percent reduction in overall power requirement for e-mail service. Apart from this, 50 percent reduction in number of mailbox server has helped reduce OS and exchange license requirements.

CRM enhances visibility

t Mahindra Lifespace, there was a need for understanding the efficacy of marketing campaigns in generating leads and their conversion to sales. It was important to understand at what stage were leads getting lost and the reasons for the same. There was also a demand from the business to create new functionalities for addressing the need to schedule and capture internal inspection of flats prior to delivery. The internal inspection is done for all flats to generate and address problems, if any, and also for taking care of customer requests for customization. To address this issue, the firm embarked on a SAP CRM implementation, to help it service the customer across the entire lifecycle. Post deployment, the firm has complete visibility into the lead management process right from enquiry to acquisition. It is not only able to determine the quality of marketing campaigns, but is also able to enforce better quality as it has complete visibility into complaints. The system has been configured for executives to receive automatic e-mail alerts as the customer moves from one stage to other in its life cycle. This has helped in providing faster response to customer needs. With appropriate lead tracking in the system, the conversion rate has greatly improved. Also, complete visibility into complaints tracking and resolution has resulted in improved customer service.

snapshot Company: Mahindra Lifespace Developers Project: SAP CRM implementation Project Head: Girish Hadkar, Head-IT

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Logistics solution increases efficiency

VS Dynamic Global Freight Service is India’s largest freight forwarder with offices in all major ports and airport cities in India. The firm wanted to implement a system, which can help its managers get a complete visibility of operational and financial information to help them make more informed decisions. In line with its objective, the company decided to implement a logistics and supply chain software. TVS selected Softlink’s Logi-Sys

snapshot Company: TVS Dynamic Global Freight Services Project: Supply chain management Project Head: Jayendran, DGM Information Technology SI/Vendor: Softlink Global

software, a web-based solution for the logistics industry. The solution includes customs clearance module that allows to file online bill of entry and shipping bill. The customs clearance module takes care of real-time duty, tariff and notification updates, which automates duty calculation process and reduces manual intervention of end users. With the help of Logi-Sys, TVS is able to generate MIS reports and dashboards easily and get real-time 360 degree view of its business information. The company’s senior management can now review business performance across sales team, line of business and across branches. With the help of the system, TVS has gained up to 10 percent of the total resource cost. It has also improved customer service with instant access to client’s shipment status. Apart from this, the company has been able to reduce paper work.

SAP enables transparency on payouts

ockhardt is a research-based global healthcare enterprise with relevance in the fields of pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and a chain of advanced super speciality hospitals. With the steep growth of its U.S.-based business, Wockhardt was finding it extremely difficult to track, ascertain, compute and measure the huge payout for chargebacks, various rebates, fees, and medicaid payouts. It was often difficult to challenge the credit claimed by a customer through chargebacks. Also, processing was done

snapshot Company: Wockhardt Project: Implementation of SAP Vistex Project Head: Venkat Iyer, CIO

manually, thereby leading to human errors. To address challenges faced in the light of the growing business, Wockhardt decided to implement SAP Vistex solution. With the integration of EDI and SAP, chargeback receipt at the company has been completely automated. The payment process is now approval-based, which enables the company to easily detect duplicate or void payments and transactions. This in turn results in substantial savings. With the system, rebates are tightly integrated with SAP Sales and the SAP Finance module. Also, the Medicaid invoice processing is automated and seamlessly integrated with SAP FICO. Post implementation of the solution, Wockhardt has good control on the bidding probability and price offerings — and the failure has reduced by 10–15percent.

Infosys improves employee info management

s a huge IT services firm with an employee base of over 150,000 employees spread across 30 countries, Infosys faced a huge challenge in efficiently managing the increasing number of documents and processes associated with employees throughout their life cycle. To address this, it developed a suite of applications called Integrated Employee Life Cycle Management Suite of Applications (ELCM). ELCM has helped Infosys in reducing or eliminating the cost, inefficiency and risk of managing paper-based employee documents. It has also helped Infosys in enabling consistency and accuracy in high-volume HR processes, such as on-boarding, performance reviews, etc. Today, the platform is a single place to look for complete information about an employee from different angles like projects, personal information, role and responsibility, training and certifications, passports, visas, and work permits. This also contains documents related to financials, health insurance, ESOPs, tax and loans. As a result, the employee document management has been automated completely with 400 plus different varieties of documents maintained for each employee, scaling up to13 million documents. Infosys has been able to reduce turnaround time for document verification from 10 days to one day. Also, with 21 integration points with other apps and processes, separation today is zero-paper and zeromanual intervention activity.

snapshot Company: Infosys Project: Employee life cycle management Project Head: Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, VP and Group Head, Information Systems

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Security

Cairn Energy secures critical infra

airn Energy India’s Mangala Processing Terminal (MPT) is spread over an area of 1.6 square kms. The MPT is designed to process crude oil from the Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya fields — collectively known as the MBA fields and is presently processing 175,000 BOPD of crude oil. The site is designated as critical infrastructure by the Indian Government with an essential business need for high security. Cairn India was facing challenges

snapshot Company: Cairn Energy India Project: Fence Intrusion Detection System (FIDS) Project Head: Priya Narayanan, DGM- Information Services

in protecting the perimeter of such a high security/sensitive crude processing terminal. So, the company decided to install Fence Intrusion Detection System (FIDS) of Future Fiber Technologies and integrate it with the CCTV system of Dvtel to ensure effective monitoring of the plant perimeter. Deployment of the FIDS system has enabled real-time monitoring of the fence with electronic alerts. Today, it’s possible to know the exact location where an intrusion has occurred and where to dispatch the security staff. Post deplyment, there has been reduction in expenses of patrolling vans and squad by ` 3 lakh per month and reduction in number of fixed security posts by 50 percent. Integration of CCTV system with FIDS has reduced the CCTV camera placement from 64 to 20 as the fence is dived into virtual zones in the software.

iGATE secures itself for Web 2.0 era

ith an increase in the number of employees joining the firm coupled with a rise in the number of sophisticated threats, iGATE wanted to ensure a safe and secure browsing experience. The company also wanted to enforce Internet usage policy on corporate assets used by roaming users and ensure that the confidential information did not leave the network. To enable this, iGATE implemented a secure web gateway solution from Websense for all the corporate users and mobile users whose access was

snapshot Company: iGATE Project: Security solution in the cloud Project Head: Chella Namasivayam M, CIO

informationweek october 2012

filtered through the Websense data center in the cloud. The solution enforces iGATE’s Internet usage policy in the cloud and protects corporate users and roaming users from viruses, spyware and modern threats. The architecture has been designed in such a way that all its small offices access the Internet through the Websense cloud for ensuring policy enforcement, while large offices that have a proxy, forward web requests to the Websense cloud. A centralized manager is installed in Mumbai for centralized policy management and reporting. The real-time scanning and categorization capabilities of the solution has allowed iGATE to enable access to social networking and other Web 2.0 content websites to its employees, without compromising security or facing legal liability risks.

Unified authentication strengthens security

ahindra and Mahindra Financial Services Limited (MMFSL) is one of India’s leading non-banking finance companies providing personalized finance to the rural and semi-urban sectors. Due to lack of a coherent authentication strategy, there were multiple applications within MMFSL, with each one of them having their own authentication needs and user repositories. This meant that every user had to remember multiple user names and passwords to access different applications. This led to recurrent issues such as setting up accounts for each employee in each application; issues of users forgetting their passwords; the possibility of potential security breaches; and increasing overheads linked to system administration and support departments. In order to resolve these issues, MMFSL implemented a unified repository of users, which it named as MF-EKA. MF-EKA is a structured approach that allows various stakeholders to access all the applications centric to business, customers, dealers and its intranet-based application through a single identity — called the golden key. It provides a unified mechanism to manage the authentication of users and implement business rules determining user access to applications and data. Post deployment, the company’s data is more secure. As most of the applications are synchronized, the help desk activity has been eased out.

snapshot Company: MMFSL Project: Providing single key to users to access multiple applications Project Head: Suresh A S, General Manager IT

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Lifestyle boosts loyalty program

ifestyle is one of the leading retailers in the country. It comes under the Landmark Group outlets, which also owns other outlet brands such as Max Fashion, Spar Hypermarket, Gloria Jeans, and Polynation Food Courts. Its Inner Circle Platinum Credit Card is a co-branded credit card with Standard Chartered Bank that offers multiple benefits to customers. The card can be used across Lifestyle and other Landmark Group stores. The biggest challenge faced by

snapshot Company: Landmark Group Project: Customer loyalty program Project Head: Sudesh Agarwal, CIO

the Group was to combine customer’s points which were accrued at other outlets. It also had to follow banking guidelines to maintain the privacy of customer data. Landmark overcame this challenge by providing a secure way to transfer the data from the Bank to its location, using an encrypted method. It integrated this encryption with Java for completely securing transactions. Post implementation of the co-branded credit card, its loyalty customers increased manifold; it currently has nearly 4 million customers across India. As this is a co-branded credit cum loyalty card, the investment has been shared with the Bank and there is a 50 percent reduction in the overall implementation costs. A further cost saving is expected; operating costs will come down as the number of customers increase.

IP-based surveillance improves security

anappuram Finance, India’s first listed gold loan company has over 2,700 branches across 22 states. With the growing branches and network, ensuring branch premise security was becoming challenging for the firm. Standalone and localized surveillance did not give an insight into branches from the central headquarters. Consequently, Manappuram decided to deploy IP-based surveillance solution (instead of analog) as IP-based cameras offer

snapshot Company: Manappuram Finance Project: IP-based surveillance solution Project Head: Anand Nair, AGM – IT Services, Manappuram Group SI/Vendor: Dax Networks

more ease in management and scalability. The project involved centralized surveillance for more than 2,700 branch locations across India and monitoring and managing the surveillance from the headquarters in Kerala. Manappuram’s centralized surveillance helps the company manage its branches easily from a single location. Instant notifications help the management take pro-active measures and prevent crime and theft in branches. Also, systematic storage helps in meeting the statutory requirements of the regulatory authorities involving crime and thefts. As a result of the central surveillance, the cost of additional supervisory staffing has been reduced as all branches are monitored from a central location, with a dedicated 24x7 security team.

Nucleus Software embarks on security journey

ucleus Software Exports Limited (NSEL) provides software solutions to the banking and financial services industry. Being a software product company, the protection of its software source code IPR is the topmost concern of the company. Though NSEL had necessary technology controls in the form of Data Leakage Prevention (DLP) tools and other IT-related controls in place, it lacked the necessary security process framework across the organization. In order to overcome this issue, the company decided to embark on a security journey to improve risk governance across the organization. The company conducted a Security Awareness Program, wherein it trained 90 percent employees. In order to improve its processes, the company established Information Security Management System with adherence to all the applicable 129 controls out of the total 133 controls of the framework. With ISMS, the company has been able to build processes that by design prevent any information/infrastructure disaster and bring resilience to the organization. In addition, in order to have adequate security processes, the company ensured compliance with ISO 27001 framework. As part of the project, the company formalized a security weakness/incident reporting process. There has been reduction in the overall enterprise risk by 26 percent, translating to savings of million of rupees.

snapshot Company: Nucleus Software Exports Limited Project: Security Framework Project Head: Rajesh Garg, Vice President & Global Head (ISS, NPP & Product Support)

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Security

MVML secures visitor entry process

ahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd. (MVML), located at Chakan, Pune, wanted to manage visitors entering the facility in order to meet its security needs and compliance requirements. In line with its objective, the company deployed a three-tier authentication visitor management system (VAMS) to provision a gate pass and track visitors. The system was integrated with SMS gateway and active directory services, which helps to generate SMSes and e-mails for employee approval

snapshot Company: Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd. Project: Three-tier authentication visitor management system (VAMS) Project Head: Bhushan Kulkarni, Assistant Manager

on every visitor’s entry and crossverification. The employee sends an online request for visitor authentication. An authentication code is sent via SMS to the visitor’s mobile. The visitor then provides the code to the security guard, who generates the visual photo identity entry pass after code verification. The system allows unlimited login IDs to be created by employees for creating appointments. Currently, total of 21,000 visitor details are stored in VAMS. Visitor records are centrally stored and database backup is maintained for three months (active) and one year (archive), which helps the security team for investigations. Time taken to manage each visitor has reduced from 10 minutes to one minute. Also, there has been reduction in manpower usage to manage visitors from three to one.

RSWM opts for IP-based surveillance

ith theft of raw materials at an all-time high and thieves targeting factories and other storage facilities, manufacturing facilities and factories are trying to benefit from the security offered by IP-based video surveillance. Textile manufacturing company, RSWM Group is one such company that has used the latest IP-based technology. The devices that are implemented in the project are certified and well-known brands. Unlike analog surveillance systems,

snapshot Company: RSWM Project: IP-based video surveillance Project Head: Naresh Sharma, Deputy General Manager IT (DYB)

informationweek october 2012

which rely on point-to-point cabling, IP-based surveillance systems are designed to allow users to monitor and record video over an IP network. Post implementation, the management can easily watch the movement at every location of internal factory, machinery, store, accounts, etc. Apart from this, it can ensure better control over workers as they are aware that they are under the surveillance of IP camera. Consequently, there is more productivity. Though this project is not directly related to returns on commercial value, the company expects to best utilize its existing resources (system related to production). Because of the fear of surveillance system, the company has observed greater sincerity among all the staff members for their work and duties.

Active Directory project improves security posture

ndia’s largest bank, SBI, undertook an Active Directory Project to provide the base infrastructure for common services such as authentication, authorization and collaboration. The scope of the implementation was across all the domestic branches and offices of SBI and its associate banks across the country. The implementation aimed to provide an overall solution that will allow the Bank to accommodate requests and change scenarios expeditiously with centralized control of the end-user desktops and servers. As Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) is an integral part of Window OS, no additional hardware or software was required at the branch level. At present, almost 50 percent of over 15,000 branches of SBI have been migrated to the Active Directory. On an average, the Bank is migrating around 150 branches on a daily basis. The Active Directory platform will provide many benefits including centralization of end-user system control, data protection and security, efficient administration of the Bank’s IT resources, easy and quick deployment of policies, and centralized patch management. The deployment has made the environment of the Bank more secure by preventing probable frauds. The Bank believes that this will definitely help in reducing future costs of fraud investigation. Earlier, the Bank had various access control software. Post deployment, it will save on renewal and license costing as the usage of these software solutions would be discontinued.

snapshot Company: State Bank of India (SBI) Project: Active Directory implementation Project Head: N Jambunathan, Chief General Manager (IT)

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Siva Group secures cloud environment MVML resolves security computing, to enhance customer rganizations using a secure Ocloud environment are always confidence in terms of data security. challenges concerned about security issues like vendor’s security model and ability to respond to audit requirements; administrator accountability; data retention/backup standards; and place of data storage. Siva Industries and Holdings was also concerned about security of its data in the cloud. Thus, it implemented a security architecture, from Internet gateway perimeter level to end-user

snapshot Company: Siva Industries & Holdings Project: SecureSky Project Head: Selvam K, Group CIO

The security system took into account factors such as data flow architecture and network security; security over virtualization on Hyper-V platform; e-mail security; and compliance with ISO-27001. Post deployment, the company’s Internet Gateway receives better and centralized security control. The solution is cost effective as the number of Internet connections has reduced. It also offers single credential for each user. Today, the central SOC and NOC teams can monitor who is doing what and the performance of each device and connectivity. The company has been able to ensure e-mail security — it has eliminated spam and the risk of hacking of any mailbox.

Integrated surveillance powers Tata Steel

ata Steel is one of the top ten global steel makers and the world’s second most geographically diversified steel producer. The company wanted to diligently monitor its entire plant and for this purpose needed an integrated surveillance system. The company decided to integrate analog CCTV cameras (both PTZ and fixed type) spread over the whole plant at strategic locations connected to the TCP/IP network by means of a single channel video encoder and the nearest network switch.

snapshot Company: Tata Steel Project: Integrated surveillance system Project head: Prasenjit Dutta, Sr. Manager (Electrical) SI/vendor: Honeywell Automation India

As the company needed to integrate CCTV cameras spread unevenly across the plant along with a handful of nearby control rooms to house layer 2 network switch, it was looking for a customized solution, which enabled flexibility of populating the switch ports as per field requirements. In line with its requirements, the company chose Honeywell’s Universal Surveillance System, which includes a mix of fixed and flexible networking port solution. Under the project, total of 117 cameras were integrated on Honeywell’s Universal Surveillance System platform with a combination of layer 2 and layer 3 switches in a customized configuration. With the project, the company today has a cost optimized solution to monitor its plant and has the flexibility in terms of future scalability of the system.

VML was facing a unique problem at its Chakan plant in Pune. The firm observed that there was frequent business downtime due to virus threats found on the robotics standalone workstations. Typically, every concern related to virus attacks was resolved by a team based in Germany. Due to time zone differences, the team faced huge challenges in getting remote support. This caused loss of production, leading to huge financial, as well as business losses to the company. For example, the notional production loss due to these issues was estimated at ` 5.4 crore. The team collaborated with all key stakeholders for problem identification and improved the process. In the first stage, key architectural and structural issues were resolved. A risk assessment plan was worked out by consulting the German system integrator. The team also educated the end-users and created awareness among key stakeholders. As a result of the improved process, the production schedule for the financial year was achieved in time, and there was a smooth transition of products observed, with no loss of man days. The firm could also do away with telesupport and on-site visits. The process has also minimized virus threats by a significant percentage. This can be seen from the fact that there have been no losses due to virus attacks in the last 12 months. The company was also able to achieve production schedule for the financial year in time.

snapshot Company: Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) Project: Improved security process for robotics standalone workstations Project Head: Denzil Rebello, Assistant Manager

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social

Collaboration yields benefits for L&T Infotech

nline social collaboration platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter have changed the way people interact, thus becoming hotbeds for innovative marketing. Looking at the immense benefits offered by such collaboration platforms in the enterprise environment, L&T Infotech developed its enterprise social collaboration platform CliquePoint on SharePoint 2010. The platform was integrated with line of business systems like CRM, HRMS, ERP, etc., to tap important business events and provide them socially to relevant individuals. Developed with an aim to facilitate and manage the unstructured knowledge within the enterprise, the platform enables employees to collaborate on projects, share updates, and discuss ideas and best practices. It enables employees to collaborate and communicate with global colleagues on

highlights Reduction in e-mail usage by 35 percent Product development time for geographically distributed teams has reduced by 15 percent Increase in idea generation by 30 percent

projects, events, and day-to-day work. CliquePoint enables employees to add links, blogs, and add and follow colleagues. The platform can be integrated with Outlook and includes HTML 5-based extended interface for mobiles and tablets; thus it can be accessed from multiple devices. The platform is also extendible to external stakeholders, including customers, partners and vendors. The solution has accelerated the product development cycle, increased situational awareness

snapshot Company: L&T Infotech Project: Social collaboration platform, CliquePoint Project head: Ashish Varerkar, Alliance Manager - Microsoft

and enabled faster decision making. Efficiencies in business operations has in turn resulted in cost savings for the company. Since various stakeholders in the organization are benefiting from CliquePoint, there is an indirect cost saving assessed at approximately 0.025 percent of the revenue. With the platform, turnaround time and customer service has improved manifold. Also, productivity of active users has increased by 20 percent.

Intranet boosts collaboration

o improve communication between its employees, Mahindra Real Estate embarked on the development of an internal platform. The objective was to enhance corporate communication, boost knowledge management and improve business processes. This project was jointly driven with the HR team. The team created a task force, which had representation from different business functions. The intranet portal was built on the MOSS 2010 platform, and the firm made use of the existing

group infrastructure both in terms of hardware and licensing for its deployment. To encourage employees to participate and visit the portal, the team incorporated several interesting features. For example, a corporate notice board updates employees on the latest policy changes, structural changes, important recruitments, tie-ups and project launches. The team also added another interesting feature called My Wall Update — an app similar

highlights

snapshot

The ‘Post your ideas’ section has seen a lot of innovative suggestions coming from various employees A ‘wall’ similar to Facebook allows employees to post their status and share their thoughts

informationweek october 2012

Company: Mahindra Lifespace Developers Project: Social Intranet Project Head: Girish Hadkar, Head-IT

to Facebook but only for employees. Employees are able to engage in discussions, share knowledge, or build a knowledge repository on professional subjects using blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Further, document repositories have been configured according to different function groups in the organization. Meta data attributes, content types and permissions for each repository have been appropriately set. A consolidated calendar displays upcoming group events, company events and the list of holidays. Another interesting feature is ‘Ask your Leader’. Using this feature, any employee can ask any question to the leadership team. An e-mail alert is generated accordingly to make the individuals in the leadership team aware that they have to answer this question.

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Royal Orchid gets personal with guests

mong India’s fastest growing hotel groups, the Royal Orchid Group of Hotels operates 23 hotels across 16 locations. However, even as the organization was expanding quickly, its hotels were operating as separate islands with little visibility of each other. Information updates and communication between team members located in various destinations was done using Excel spreadsheets and e-mails. With the increase in the number of locations, the Group found it increasingly difficult to keep a track of information. The Group decided that it needed to enhance its customer service by building a guest loyalty database and keeping a track of guest information. With the huge number of geographically spread locations, the Group decided that taking the cloud route was the best option. Accordingly, after evaluat-

highlights Managing staff performance in real-time dashboards has saved 1-2 admin hours per day Chatter-based social media strategy has reduced communications cycles from 24 to 2 hours

ing several options, it decided to go for Salesforce CRM. Today, Salesforce is set up as a central data repository for the entire business, which enables Royal Orchid’s hotels to operate as a single entity. More importantly, Salesforce has laid down the foundation for an innovative social business strategy for engaging with customers more deeply. For example, sales professionals have access to detailed information about their end customers, while faster customer service

snapshot Company: Royal Orchid Hotels. Project: Cloud-based CRM Project Head: Dhiraj Trivedi, Corporate Director, Revenue Management and E-Distribution, Royal Orchid Group of Hotels

can be delivered using any channel from the call center to social networking websites. The platform also gives deep insights into customers’ likes, dislikes and buying patterns which are the foundation for a highly personal service. Salesforce Chatter is used by the Group to help its team members collaborate and share information in a style similar to social networking websites such as Facebook. It also uses iPad/iPhone to do video conferencing sessions for meetings.

Sanofi Pasteur ‘shares’ the power of Facebook

nitiated by Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of Sanofi, Mothers against Flu (MAF) is a Facebook community uniting mothers across India with a single objective — protecting their children from flu. In India, Sanofi Pasteur has been leading the fight against flu using a 360 degree approach to increase awareness. It has been educating the medical fraternity and the public through doctor contact programs and PR and advertising.

The MAF Facebook community was conceptualized and created to be the next step in engaging with the target group of modern urban moms who share the latest in their lives on social media. In a modest budget, MAF enabled large audience reach and also garnered high media interest being the first FB campaign by a vaccine company. With over 5,000 fans in less than three months, and press coverage of more than 90 press clips across

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snapshot

More than 5,000 ‘likes’ in less than 3 months 90 press clips talking about the campaign

Company: Sanofi India Limited Project: Leveraging social media Project Head: Milind Khamkar, Senior Director –Information Solutions (India & South Asia)

the leading publications, MAF helped build an emotional appeal for flu prevention and also the image of the corporate brand. The greatest success was the fact that the business team, which had initiated this project as a pilot, is today committed to take it forward on a long term-basis. MAF was relaunched this May and will be run on a long-term basis to spread flu awareness using the well-known medium of Facebook. The MAF community became a low-investment targeted campaign, which is impactful in messaging, enables two-way communication, and provides direct linkage to corporate brand — ‘Mothers against Flu’, a Sanofi Pasteur initiative.

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Mobility

MDM solution simplifies mobility

nterprise data exists in various settings outside office on laptops and handheld devices. Yet enterprises frequently leave the responsibility for the management and security of these critical assets in the hands of end users who are, for the most part, neither security nor information management experts. This abundance of roaming data makes it essential to have the right enterprise management software. In line with this objective, Essar chose a Mobile Device Management

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: MDM deployment Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

(MDM) solution from Sybase Afaria. The scope included implementing the MDM solution for 1,500 users, spanning across the Group in India. With this implementation, Essar has got centralized control of all mobile devices and tablets, as well as the apps running on them. From a user point of view, the MDM solution gives employees access to business collaboration tools, apps and enterprise content. From a business point of view, the management can protect data in the case of lost or stolen devices. Today, Essar can remotely install, update and remove internal enterprise applications. It can even track and maintain the whole device inventory for compliance purposes. The MDM solution also enables Essar to reduce roaming costs by regulating the roaming policy.

Mobile initiative saves inventory costs

uture Group wanted to reduce inventory management costs through proper information gathering and tracking systems. It wanted to do this by leveraging mobile-based systems on the shop floor for providing information access to employees. By using mobile solutions on the shop floor, the Group could improve inventory management due to central visibility at the store level and the front-end. To do this, the Group setup a secure Wi-Fi store infrastructure. This consisted of Cisco access points at the stores and

snapshot Company: Future Group Project: Mobile initiative for inventory management Project Head: Parakh Dave, Group CIO

informationweek october 2012

a back-end Cisco wireless controller. The Group also created a mobile app, which was integrated with back-end ERP system for inventory, price and stock checks. This was used by the stock audit team for physical verification and counting. Today, the Group has improved the efficiency of its stores. For example, employees have quick access to information related to stocks and sales, which in turn has helped in immediately resolving price and EAN discrepancies. The Group has realized 20 percent increase in inventory availability and management, 10 percent reduction in travel costs, and 5 percent reduction in new employee training costs. The current project will be replicated for all the Future Group store formats across 1,000 locations in the next 3-4 years. The Group expects to increase the customer base by 10 times in the next five years, without a substantial increase in workforce.

MMFSL ensures faster loan services

hrough a vast network of branches, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd (MMFSL) provides personalized finance for utility vehicles, tractors and cars, focusing on the rural and semiurban sectors. Its customers belong to the low-income groups. MMFSL wanted to empower the business team with mobile technology to accomplish business processing tasks with minimum dependency, duplicity and lead time. To address this, MMFSL came up with the concept of MF Biz-Connect, which revolves round 3Cs – Corporate, Customer & Care and 3S’ – Support, Solutions & Services. This solution comprises a customized, full-featured, multimediaenabled, and portable handheld device. Before deployment, business leads and customer data were collected manually from worksheets like loan applications. These were filled manually by users using desktops — this resulted in inaccuracy of the collected data, leading to loan application rejections. It took two days to issue loans; business executives and customers were fully dependent on the branch availability. The new solution has enhanced electronic documentation, enabling paperless operations, so loans can now be issued within two hours. Apart from this, there is more effective utilization of manpower, and elimination of duplicate entries. Customer data (even thumbprints) can be captured and uploaded from the field. And an algorithm cross-checks and looks for duplicate or fraudulent customers.

snapshot Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Service Ltd Project: MF Biz-Connect Project Head: Vinod Paul, Project Manager

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Linterland taps the rural market

ith roughly 790 million consumers, the Indian rural market is vast, and represents the largest potential market. However, the dynamics and size of the market makes it difficult for companies to take full advantage. In order to gain a thorough understanding of the rural markets, Linterland, the specialist rural communication and marketing arm of Lowe Lintas & Partners, initiated the Project LinScan. The company architected LinScan as a centralized server-based solution with

snapshot Company: Lintas India Pvt. Ltd. Project: LinScan Project head: Pravin Savant, CTO

all the data and intelligence residing in a single secure location. The app enables Linterland to analyze the data using the geocoded information and overlaying it on a map in real-time. It enables the firm to prioritize markets, plan distribution points across geographies, and identify the right media options, resulting in cost-effective marketing initiatives. The app is compatible with all the widely accepted mobile platforms and enables surveys in real-time. Using this app on their mobile phones, the firm’s rural sales force can continuously update feedback. It enables the firm to overlay location-specific considerations, for example, dates when congregations (melas, haats, and vegetable and fruit markets) are held in these locations, and their proximity to logistical points (stocks and storage, highways, available accommodation for camping staff, etc.)

ICICI Sec launches mobile-based workflow

CICI Securities was looking for a solution that will eliminate the need for an employee to be in the office to complete the approval process of any important item. For example, a bill uploaded by an employee for a critical payment while the approver is not in office can still be approved by the approver from the comfort of his device. Thus, the company created an application called ‘Business workflow on Mobile,’ which allows approving of business workflow generated requests over the Internet through mobiles. Users can login to the

snapshot Company: ICICI Securities Project: Business workflow on Mobile Project Head: Joydeep Dutta, CTO

application using their GPRS enabled handset, access the URL provided, and use their office ID and password to complete the approval process. HR processes and financial approvals and settlement systems are the areas that benefitted immediately with the deployment of the application. Earlier, delays in critical payments were common mainly due to the approvers traveling frequently on business trips. Non-approval at a regional level meant delays in the payments, which in turn led to an expense overhead due to fines incurred in such cases. The mobilebased workflow system prevents such situations and provides an indirect cost saving to the company. In the past one year, more than 20 percent of the approvals over the company’s core systems were made over the mobile. This system has also brought down the turnaround time by more than 50 percent and reduced fund pilferage.

Mobile app improves service delivery

leading Digital Generator (DG) service provider for the telecom sector, Mahindra Powerol, provides preventive and maintenance services through its service network of over 200 authorized dealers. After a repair is carried out, a Field Service Report (FSR) is prepared manually by the field technician. Subsequently, the dealer submits the filled out FSR copy with the details of the services carried out to Mahindra Powerol for payment. Using the FSR as the base document, the firm then raises an invoice to end customers. This process had many inherent problems. For example, service details were often incomplete and inconclusive. Scope of repairs as per agreement was not clearly captured, which resulted in the firm bearing the cost of such repairs. To resolve this issue, the firm decided to develop a mobile application, which could be used by field technicians. The app can capture data and send the same via GPRS. The mobile application does validation from the central server, and all the key and important fields can be validated with the proof of the image captured. Today, all the important values such as field defects and service aspects of engine are supported with images for immense clarity and easy understanding. This has resulted in major reduction in efforts, time and costs in follow-up to collect the data and documents. The company has also ensured zero rejection of services from the customers.

snapshot Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Project: Mobile application for field agents Project Head: Bishwanath Ghosh, VP-IT

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cloud computing

Private cloud improves delivery of health services

healthcare delivery organization having a chain of eye care hospitals, Centre for Sight (CFS) was witnessing huge amount of growth in the last one year. This growth can be seen from the fact that the organization expanded from 12 hospitals to 42 hospitals. As the number of locations grew, the organization realized that the manageability of locations would be extremely difficult. Since this kind of growth could only be managed through standardization and controls, the organization felt the need to upgrade its IT infrastructure to support its fast growing network. Only four functions — out of the seven critical business functions at the organization were running on IT support, while the other three were manual. Additionally, the four automated areas were running in

highlights Inventory controls have helped in achieving savings of approximately ` 2.2 million Saving of 525 man days at the middle management level

isolation at each location. To address these issues, the firm wanted to standardize applications to meet the growing needs of the business and undertake initiatives that ensured scalability and brought better process automation and controls. To enable this, the firm selected a private cloud-based environment for running all the applications. Today, all the business functions are automated and integrated. Previously, multiple registrations

snapshot Company: Centre for Sight Project: Private cloud implementation Project Head: Ajay Jassal, SVP – Business Processes & IT

and records for the same patient were recorded as branches operated in isolation. Today, there is single registration and record for one patient. The average cost of taking a new location live has come down from ` 3.5 lakh to just ` 70,000. Due to a centralized approach, the firm has also managed to save 20 minutes per location, which adds up to a saving of 525 man days at the middle management level.

Cloud powers efficiency wave at Essar

onglomerate Essar wanted to lower the barriers for adoption of technologies, while simultaneously reducing the need for the business to make a significant capital investment upfront and shortening deployment time for the IT infrastructure. To achieve this objective, Essar decided to move towards the cloud. Essar decided to implement a cloud version of its applications and examined the business case for migrating applications from the

current on-premise co-location facility to Microsoft Azure. The Group decided to embrace Microsoft Azure-based public cloud offerings for some of its applications. The complete project was accomplished by the CTO office project team in a short duration of just six weeks, including initial understanding of application by the integration partner MindTree, migration and deployment resulting into the final migration on Azure

highlights

snapshot

Turnaround time for provisioning IT infrastructure has gone down from a period of 45-60 days to just 2-3 working days now 51 percent cost savings per month

informationweek october 2012

Company: Essar Group Project: Deployment of applications on Microsoft Azure cloud Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

cloud, followed by a diligent handover and training to the Essar internal sustenance team. For the first time in the Essar’s history, four of its applications were hosted on an external cloud. While this was the first experience, it geared the project team to prepare for the next phase. Subsequently, six more applications were finalized for migration on Microsoft Azure cloud. In the next phase, the team has planned for 10 more applications to be migrated over Microsoft Azure Cloud. Essar says that this is the first public cloud adoption in the manufacturing industry segment in India, and has resulted in tremendous cost savings and high ROI for Essar. For example, net savings per month by deploying applications on Azure is to the tune of 51 percent.

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Forbes Marshall moves to Google Apps

orbes Marshall is a manufacturing organization, which has been in the business of building steam engineering and control instrumentation solutions for the last six decades. The company wanted to forge a strong internal collaboration framework but did not want to go for complex solutions that involved a lot of investment. After much evaluation, the company decided to move to Google Apps Premier Edition. The whole project included pilot implementation, migration and customized training. After the Google Apps deployment, all the users started utilizing Google mail because of its time-saving features, including message threading, labeling, powerful spam filtering, etc. Also, this solution put an end to desktop archiving of e-mail and drastically reduced the need of e-mail client support.

highlights

snapshot

Savings of 43 percent in upfront licenses in the first year alone

Company: Forbes Marshall Group of Companies

Reduces e-mail client support by 80 percent

Project: Moving to Google Apps for internal collaboration Project Head: Sharat M Airani, Chief-IT (Systems & Security)

Employees are now utilizing the sharing mechanism within Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video, which is building a new level of collaboration where employees are able to conveniently share Word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and collaborate on projects in an efficient manner. Post implementation, the phone calls have reduced by 25 percent, because every field person is able to communicate effectively with their

counterparts using Google chat and other such collaborative features, instead of calling on phone or waiting for the e-mail reply. Google Apps is also playing a major role in bringing down the internal administration efforts in maintaining the company’s legacy messaging solutions and bringing down the licensing costs. In addition, it has improved employee productivity by over 24 percent.

Cloud-based HR system transforms HR function

huge conglomerate, Godrej Group was looking at implementing an enterprise-wide HR transformation initiative for improving its productivity. The objective was to put together a process of standardization for the HR function across the Group, and ensure that the system is scalable for the future. After looking at all the possible options, the firm decided to go for a SaaS-based human capital

highlights Projected savings of ` 2 crore on different HR technology contracts Reduction in the cycle time by 33 percent for launching and completing HR processes

management platform. This system had applications related to talent management, recruitment and compensation. Post deployment of the system, the Group has been able to standardize the process for the function, which has resulted in the implementation of best practices, and in better manageability and improved monitoring. The portal is now a one stop shop for accessing talent data across the Group

snapshot Company: Godrej Industries Project: HR transformation Project Head: Shailesh Joshi, VP-Information Systems

companies. Prior to this, the data was scattered across multiple systems and needed HR intervention. The Group now has the capability to use quantitative data to make decisions for rewarding employees for performance. There has also been a substantial reduction in HR efforts for addressing managerial queries. For example, there has been a reduction in the cycle time by 33 percent for launching and completing HR processes like 360 degree feedback and performance management. Dashboards now give managers relevant and updated information As the system is based on an OPEX pricing model, costs are predictable, while the system can be scaled according to needs of the organization.

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virtualization

Virtualization enables high availability Green drive helps Hitachi Consulting in terms of utilization and the number harat Petroleum Corporation Limited B(BPCL) currently has two distinct of supported virtual machines with no improve efficiency landscapes of computing infrastructure: SAP and non-SAP. Last year, 64 servers and enterprise storage systems had reached their end of life at three data centers. To address this issue, BPCL decided to opt for a virtual infrastructure for non-SAP applications. The major business objectives of the project were to create a highly available virtualized environment both

snapshot Company: Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited Project: Virtualization Project Head: Anil Kumar Kaushik, GM (IS - Infrastructure & Services)

single point of failure. The company wanted to create an architecture framework that facilitates deployment of new virtual machines via templates that can further scale out to incorporate all the key features of the cloud. Some additional benefits achieved through this project include 30 percent reduction of manpower and 40 percent reduction of DC expenditure. This has also helped in reducing the server deployment cycle from six months to one day, and in reducing server outage by 50 percent. With this virtualization project, BPCL is taking its first step towards the private cloud. With four DC architecture geographically separated in three sites, BPCL today has ensured high availability of its resources and business applications.

Server virtualization powers Biocon

iocon, a global healthcare company, felt the need to improve its IT infrastructure. The company aimed to do this by consolidating its existing servers and storage. With consolidation, the company primarily wanted to decrease the total time taken to provision servers on-demand and the time taken to duplicate the existing servers or data across various locations. To achieve server and storage virtualization, the company used technologies from Microsoft and HP. Post consolidation, the number

snapshot Company: Biocon Project: Server and storage consolidation and virtualization Project Head: Radhakrishnan G, Associated Vice President

informationweek october 2012

of servers has come down from 55 to 8. Also the number of racks has been reduced from five to two. With consolidation, the time taken to provision a new server or to duplicate the existing server or data across various manufacturing plants or R&D divisions has also reduced drastically. For example, the time to provision servers on-demand has come down from 4-6 weeks to just 4-6 hours. Similarly, servers and storage power consumption came down from 37.5 KW to 8.0 KW. The company has also been able to save huge costs related to real estate, cooling, power and maintenance, with the TCO reduced to the quarter of the original cost. The project has also enabled end-users at Biocon to strictly adhere to compliance by easily enabling maintenance of the development environment and the test and production environments separately, in a systematic manner.

s a responsible organization, Hitachi Consulting has implemented a series of solutions to promote Green IT. These include server consolidation and virtualization, e-waste disposal, and usage of solar power. The firm earlier had a physical server farm of more than 300 Intel, Linux & RISC-based servers. By virtue of VMware virtualization, it has reduced data center footprint by 70 percent and data center OPEX by 35 percent. It has also reduced server and application provisioning time from two days to less than 60 minutes for standard requirements. The firm has built its Hyderabad campus with maximum ventilation to reduce power consumption during the daytime. For this initiative, it holds a 2-star rating from the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) for its campus facility. Hitachi Consulting is also using solar power in certain areas of the campus. For efficient disposal of waste, it has engaged a certified third-party vendor, which is entrusted with the responsibility of collecting all types of e-waste. With the intention of saving paper, the firm has discontinued paper usage for offer/appraisal letters. Now, it provides only soft copies to employees. To encourage car pooling among employees, the firm is providing monetary awards to the first three winners every month. Hitachi Consulting has also distributed jute bags to all employees to carry their lunch boxes and avoid plastic usage.

snapshot Company: Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Project: Green initiative Project Head: Sesanka Pemmaraju, Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IS / CISO

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Server virtualization improves uptime

ssar wanted an environment that provided a high level of flexibility to meet its needs, while at the same time was easy to manage and cost-effective to run. After evaluating several virtualization technologies, Essar chose to deploy the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V technology as the foundation. Essar defined the scope to include the migration of the majority of physical servers to virtual where

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: Server virtualization Project Head: Jayanta Prabhu, CTO

resources were underutilized. The project was planned in three phases. In the first phase, 30 percent server virtualization was completed. Due to this initiative, the firm has freed up 150 servers. As one physical server can host several virtual machines, it has helped Essar in reducing management costs. With features like automated virtual machine reconfiguration, flexible resource control, and quick migration, Essar can create a dynamic IT environment that uses virtualization to not only respond to problems, but also to anticipate increased demands. The cost benefit ratio is at an impressive 43.95 percent. The virtualized hardware has reduced power and cooling energy consumption by 75 percent. Also, deployment of a new virtual server takes just two hours rather than two weeks with a physical server.

DC transformation powers Evalueserve

ith the growing number of physical servers, storage and manpower to manage its data center (DC), Evalueserve, a fast growing KPO, was facing challenges in managing its data center. As business volumes grew, the firm found itself running out of the DC space to accommodate further growth. After doing a complete cost benefit analysis, the firm decided to go for a data center transformation project. While designing the architecture, the focus was on reducing the physical

snapshot Company: Evalueserve Project: Data Center transformation Project Head: Sachin Jain, CIO and CISO

number of servers and in optimizing and scaling the storage area network, without removing the existing SAN. Based on the utilization, role and criticality of the server, the firm decided to consolidate various servers. This step has helped in saving 30 percent capacity on the anticipated load. Transformation of the data center has also given the firm a platform to implement the strategy of building a hybrid cloud. The transformation exercise has helped the firm in reducing its critical data centers from four to two â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which translates in huge savings from an operational and financial point of view. Today, more than 100 physical servers have been reduced to just four physical servers. The firm has also reduced the headcount of the core data center team by two administrators. Additionally, the backup and restore window has been reduced by more than 50 percent.

Shoppers Stop reaps rewards of virtualization

hoppers Stop, one of the pioneers in setting up large format department store chains in India, operates stores for multiple business formats. Traditionally, the company purchased individual hardware for each business format. This meant that in a mall where multiple business formats existed, each format required a single physical server. The company wanted to use a single hardware to host multiple server instances for different business units. In order to consolidate its physical server fleet, the company undertook a virtualization exercise. The virtualization drive has enabled the company to consolidate its physical server fleet, improve CPU utilization, and reduce power and cooling costs, which in turn helped the company improve its return on hardware investment. Virtualization has also allowed rapid provisioning of new virtual machines to meet the business demand. The company has been able to standardize server installations through templates and cut the time required to install servers. Post implementation of the virtualization initiative, the company has recorded significant cost savings as the number of physical servers required has come down drastically. Reduced number of servers enables better monitoring and management centrally. It has also reduced real estate and rack space requirements. Additionally, the company has been able to improve its application availability.

snapshot Company: Shoppers Stop Project: Virtualization initiative Project Head: Anil Shankar, Sr. GM - IT

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virtualization

Server virtualization drives efficiency

ith the current capacity of 1.5 lakh vehicles per annum, which is expected to reach the peak capacity of 6.5 lakh vehicles per annum in the second phase, there was a lot of dependence on IT for Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML). For example, a single minute’s downtime in the conventional server architecture could mean huge losses. To improve system reliability and utilization, MVML embarked on a comprehensive server virtualization initiative. The virtualized

snapshot Company: Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Limited (MVML) Project: Server virtualization Project Head: Vinod Barge, Assistant Manager

platform initiative was accomplished within a timeframe of 7 days, which was earlier targeted at 24 days. Using server virtualization, the firm consolidated 40 servers to 5 servers. Resource allocation can now be done on demand, as per requirements. The firm has reduced maintenance costs and has realized huge savings in terms of power utilization and cooling. Administration of virtual servers can be done centrally from a single console. Using conventional methodology, any IT resource provisioning would take 3 –4 weeks, whereas with the existing setup, the firm can provision the same in less than 10 minutes. Keeping in mind the growth of the organization, the infrastructure can be scaled up and down as per the demands of the business. The firm estimates that it has saved ` 1.75 crore due to the initiative.

The virtual benefit for Tata Institute

ata Institute of Fundamental Research wanted to expand, centralize and standardize its business-critical data server and implement virtualization. The objective was to reduce the annual maintenance cost and achieve maximum uptime for its businesscritical server. Consequently, the institute designed a virtualization tool with VMware vSphere technology and high availability on a base of IBM Intel server and IBM mid-range storage for

snapshot Company: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Project: Virtualization Project Head: H Raghavan, Manager – IT SI/Vendor: CMS Infosystems

informationweek october 2012

its business-critical application and web servers. Post virtualization, the institute achieved green IT infrastructure through optimized power consumption and rack space utilization, and less cooling requirement. The institute has been able to improve customer service and business continuity and reduce support cost due to optimized hardware. Since the server is virtually monitored, it reduces infrastructure cost. The institute has also been able to reduce operational cost due to reduction in requirement of manpower. This helps in increasing the productivity, while enabling the management and administration to allocate more time to other critical issues.

Virtualization enables rapid training

eing a services company, arranging training requirements with multiple sets of highly advanced instances according to different technologies was a challenge for Hitachi Consulting. In order to address the challenge, the company undertook a project, wherein it developed its private cloud and created gold images for different training requirements. This has enabled the company to create as many VMs as required for the training requirements. It is now able to provide multiple development server/instances within an hour. Currently, the company has approximately 450 VMs hosted in its private cloud. It is able to provide complex training setups/instances on the fly and multiple virtual desktops for R&D. Virtualization also enables the company to use the latest resource utilization features like thin provisioning to address additional RAM or hard disk space requests instantaneously. The company was able to manage Programmers Marathon, wherein more than 800 final year engineering students appear for a test on programming skills, with just 50 physical computers. This enabled significant cost savings for the company — with conventional hardware, it would have spent 20 to 40 times more. Additionally, virtualization has enabled the company to reduce its data center footprint by 70 percent, while data center OPEX has reduced by 35 percent.

snapshot Company: Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Project: Virtualization Project Head: Sesanka Pemmaraju, Director – IS & Chief Information Security Officer

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general it

Online portal improves customer satisfaction

viva Life India offers various insurance products online to its customers — both existing and prospective. Targeted at the Internetsavvy generation, the company embarked on a project related to building an online sales portal for enabling customers to purchase insurance cover online without or with minimal assistance from the company. The online self-service portal offers varied insurance cover options starting from pure term to critical illness. The journey for purchasing the policy starts with getting an online quote based on the requirement of the cover by the customer. The system has a capability to suggest the ideal sum assured based on minimal inputs provided by the customer. The system is designed to have modular and flexible architecture with a very high degree of reusability. Once

highlights Improved time to market, especially with the rules engine Only cost incurred was support subscription cost of Red Hat licenses, program development and hardware cost

the customer chooses to purchase the policy and based on the premium displayed online, he needs to enter further details to complete the process of proposal form filling. If he is an existing customer of the company, he can enter his customer ID and the data is pulled back seamlessly from the core policy system with strong back-end integration. Based on the data entered by the customer, the system can auto underwrite the proposal and can give a decision whether the policy can be

snapshot Company: Aviva Life India Project: Online self-service portal Project Head: Harnath Babu, VP- IT

issued instantly online or the customer needs to go for medical tests or submit some additional financial documents. The system also has the capability to decide the nearest authorized medical centers based on the address of the customer. The complete set of underwriting rules, product and business validations are being driven by DROOLS rules engine. Any changes in the rules can be done by the system administrator in near real time without disturbing the code deployments.

BPCL enhances employee collaboration

harat Petroleum Corporation Limited, was using an intranet, which was developed a decade back. In order to bring uniformity amongst various business units and entities, BPCL wanted to replace the old site. Accordingly, the company introduced a new site named iConnect. Under the project, the old de-centralized site architecture, which was spread geographically across locations was revised with centralized site architecture.

highlights Eliminates multiple versions of documents circulated through mails, enabling saving on server storage on e-mail archival system Reduction in TCO due to server consolidation from four geographical sites

informationweek october 2012

With the introduction of the iConnect site, employees are able to upload and share documents, and collaborate while working on a single shared document. This helps all the participants have the same version of document at any given point of time. The solution enables employees to keep work-related documents at a central location, which in turn helps BPCL retain knowledge within the organization. As a security tag can be assigned for every content, information can be

snapshot Company: BPCL Project: Intranet portal Project Head: Anil Kumar Kaushik, GM (IS -Infrastructure & Services) SI/Vendor: Datamatics Global Services

accessed by users based on job profiles. It also allows automatic content archival using expiry date details of uploaded content. It includes a discussion board, which enables conducting virtual brainstorming sessions and creating discussion threads. Users can create surveys to collect the feedback and opinion from the end users, thus saving the cost of a dedicated tool. Its publishing process is automated with the workflows so that all the content can be approved and reviewed by designated authorities before getting published. iConnect includes ‘Ask an expert’ functionality, where each end-user can ask questions to the subject matter expert. Employees can search the content based on keywords, which drastically reduces searching time they used to spend earlier in locating the files manually.

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Chhattisgarh embarks on GIS project

hhattisgarh, the 7th largest state of India, has a population of about 2.25 crore. It has 44 percent of geographical area under thick forests, and has more than 14 tribes comprising approximately 60 percent of the total population. Known as the ‘Rice Bowl of India’, Chhattisgarh supports 20,000+ paddy accessions mainly in the plains situated centrally. Plateaus are thickly forested with difficult terrain and are inhibited by ethnic tribes. Considering such complex situations, the government of Chhattisgarh through CHiPS and Indian Space Program and the Remote Sensing Applications Centre (RRSSC), Nagpur set in motion the project on GIS (geographic information system) database generation in the state of Chhattisgarh with use of high resolution satellite data. The state intends to provide the GIS data to all

highlights

snapshot

Identification for suitable sites for developing PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas)

Company: Chhattisgarh Infotech & Biotech Promotion Society (CHiPS)

Optimal routing of High Power Transmission Lines, Chhattisgarh State Electricity Board & Power grid

government departments/agencies and NGOs for identifying areas for improvement, thereby increasing the productivity and GDP of the state. A GIS Application Centre is also being setup. Geographical Atlas of the state on various layers has been prepared using GIS. The project comprises of three application areas: Establishment of natural resources database for the state of Chhattisgarh on 1:50,000 scale; geo-referencing of village maps

Project: GIS database generation Project Head: A.M Parial, Chief Executive Officer

and development of Linear Imaging Self-scanning Sensor (LISS) for the state; and development of spatial database for road network. Post implementation, micro-level planning and implementation of developmental activities were made possible. There were other benefits such as smart cards for farmers to facilitate e-governance and e-banking, efficient settlement of compensation claims, land acquisition and rehabilitation in infrastructure projects and precision farming.

Mudra’s FM Ki Duniya brings massive benefits

DB Mudra Group operates out of more than 25 physical locations spread across the country. It launched FM Ki Duniya, a web-based integrated facility management portal that caters to the entire facility management/ administration function’s requirement of the Group. In a large enterprise, especially ones with multiple offices spread across the geography, the facility management/ administration function has to keep track of various transactions that

span the length and breadth of the enterprise. This is cumbersome and time consuming and requires a large task force to manage the above tasks manually. Therefore, the Group has automated most of the above processes thus bringing in efficiency, increased productivity and cost savings. Post deployment of FM Ki Duniya, documents that were earlier scattered across 25+ physical locations are now accessible centrally through the portal. Scanned copies of the documents

highlights

snapshot

` 18 lakh savings in electricity costs due to electricity monitoring and implementing remedial actions ` 15 lakh of discount received for payment before due date with respect to utility payments

Company: DDB Mudra Group Project: FM Ki Duniya – a web-based integrated facility management portal Project Head: Sebastian Joseph, President – Technology & FM

are available for download (rights based). There is no more dependency on a single person. SMS/e-mail alerts are generated for various actions, renewals, etc. Employees, who were earlier dependent on the administration teams for all activities such as travel and leaves, can now do their own travel management, leave management, stationery requisitions through the selfhelp facility provided in the portal. FM Portal also has a tight integration with various business applications such as accounting and HR. This ensures a tight cost control. Actual cost incurred, as well as committed costs are available on a real-time basis. Innovative initiatives such as electricity monitoring, payment of utility bills before due date, effective vendor management, insurance management, etc. has further helped in substantial cost savings.

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general it

Automation improves cash flow

aton India Information Technology Center (EITC) offers IT services to internal Eaton businesses. Its International Shared Service Center (ISSC) in Pune supports various financial and accounting processes. There were many manual touchpoints in the payment process. This led to errors in payment processing, causing statutory and compliance issues, and severe customer dissatisfaction. There was no direct feed for reconciliations of

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: Automation of financial reconciliation process Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

payments from the MNC bank to the ISSC. Voluminous paper filing (20,000 paper forms) required offshore payments, which resulted in high costs, documentation and archiving issues. The new solution was designed to achieve complete end-to-end automated processes for file transfer from Eaton to the MNC Bank, and a reverse feed from the MNC bank for reconciliation. Post implementation, manual touchpoints were reduced and this mitigated processing errors. It helped in establishing a robust, compliant and accurate payment process. Eaton has visibility for all levels of status updates regarding the payment processed for disbursement in the MNC Bank. The automation of processes and reduction of manual intervention will result in significant dollar savings every year for Eaton.

EIH Hotels improves communication

t East India Hotels (EIH), communication about the company and the industry it operated in, was communicated through a print issue. This project was just a step towards achieving the basic objective of reaching people with information and was successful in creating an impact. However, as the number of copies printed was limited due to cost limitations, the firm faced an issue in ensuring that communication reached every employee. The team faced a huge challenge in collecting content

snapshot Company: East India Hotels (EIH) Project: Digital Communication Project Head: Ravish Jhala, Systems Manager

informationweek october 2012

from different departments. Considering this business challenge, the IT and training team decided to use a digital medium to convert this into a digital platform. The project was named as ‘e-Connect’. Using this platform, the team can do content management in an easy way. Today, using the digital medium, the team can reach out to every employee and give them access to relevant business information. As the system can be accessed by every employee, it has shifted the responsibility of collecting content from a single department to every department. This has led to greater involvement and team contribution. The system also has modules such as ‘Promotions’, which help employees learn in detail the promotions planned for specific months. The same system can also be used by guests to leave feedback for each area of the hotel.

IT Operations Command Centre empowers MVML

ahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd. (MVML), located over 700 acres of land in Pune, constitutes the complete manufacturing facility for Mahindra & Mahindra’s entire medium and heavy commercial vehicles. The company realized that it was extremely important to sustain its IT infrastructure and services that were being rolled out to support all the business-critical applications. So MVML decided to set up a robust round-theclock watch tower — a complete IT Operations Command Centre (IOCC). Post implementation, the webbased monitoring and incident management system is enabling users to quickly address various types of incidents linked to network, servers, applications, databases, critical devices, etc. For senior executives, the system provides manager-cockpit, which enables them to have a quick view of the overall health status of the services. The system also provides user-defined dashboards for MIS reporting to key stakeholders and for management review. Today, the time taken for problem management — right from understanding, diagnosing and identifying the problem to complete fault finding and final resolution — has drastically reduced. The centre was able to achieve almost 99.999 percent uptime for IT services, which was earlier around 95 percent. New product development cycle and related testbeds were able to achieve an early target date.

snapshot Company: MVML Project: Setting up IT Operations Command Centre Project Head: B Venkatakrishnan – Head of IT SI/Vendor: Wipro/NexTender

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Online appraisal improves efficiencies

lobus, a well-known retail brand, wanted to simplify the annual appraisal process. Every year, the company had to spend 2-3 months to complete the process. The process was cumbersome and time consuming — the HR department sent the hard copy of appraisal form to every employee, which employee would return after filling. After that, the HR department was required to arrange the forms according to a particular store or department.

snapshot Company: Globus Stores Project: Employee appraisal system, PROBUS Project head: Meheriar Patel, CTO and Head eCommerce

To shorten the process, the company developed an employee appraisal system, PROBUS. The system uses Visual Basic 6.0 for screen designing and coding, Crystal Reports for reporting and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for storing the data. The system was conceptualized by business heads and implemented by the in-house IT team. The user-friendly system allows an employee to fill his form online. Once an employee fills the form, it can be accessed by the HR department. This also eliminates the need for an employee to carry the hard copy to the HR, which results in saving paper. This system enables Globus to save storage space and time of employees and ensures speedy appraisal process. Since the system eliminates the need for paper, it has helped Globus to save on paper costs.

GIS helps govt map electoral wards

uring any polling day of an election, it is difficult for masses to understand about electoral ward maps and the location position of polling booths. From a planning perspective, it is also important for the government to decide where they can place the polling booths, so that they can easily plan by keeping in mind the size of the constituency and the requirement of number of polling booths across the ward. To plan effectively, the Government of Maharashtra decided to do GIS

snapshot Company: State Election Commission, Govt. of Maharashtra Project: Electoral ward mapping Project Head: Neela Satyanarayana, State Election Commissioner SI / Vendor: Visual Venture

mapping of electoral ward boundaries for the city corporation elections with pointing of legends for polling booths, police stations, hospitals and voter’s list attached to each polling station. This has helped in monitoring the election process for the state election commissioner. This has also proved extremely useful for the State Election Commissioner and political parties to locate and understand the geographical needs of their wards, due to the ability to monitor the election process proactively. This is the first time that interactive maps were used. The team used Google mapping tools and some additional scripting to deliver this solution. Today, every booth’s location is available at the click of a mouse. It has also helped in giving relevant information to people, which has added to the number of participants in polling thereby enhancing the percentage of polling.

API development boosts productivity

or HDFC Securities, the entire registration process for a customer was time consuming and involved physical application form designing, printing and distributing the same to all branches and locations. HDFC Securities explored the option of having an API (Application Program Interface) solution for the core trading application. Benefits of the API-based solution were multifold. Using the API interface, HDFC Securities has already introduced key products such as implementation of online consent/registration to customers using the authentication features of the core trading system. Some new products that take advantage of this feature have been products like the DIY SIP (Do It Yourself Systematic Investment Plan). Today, the Online DIY SIP contributes to almost 25 percent of entire DIY applications sourced through various channels. The API has also ensured lower cost for launching any new product and adding new features for existing products. It has contributed to an increase in operational efficiency by 90 percent in terms of turnaround time. The online registration process has reduced usage of paper, which roughly translates into reduction of approximately 26,000 paper applications per year. Dependency on front-end manual resources and back office operations activity has been substantially reduced by about 75 percent.

snapshot Company: HDFC Securities Project: API interface for authentication Project Head: Vivek Joshi, CTO

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ICICI Sec improves user experience

eing at the forefront of putting the latest technology to work to improve its customer experience, ICICI Direct launched a rich Internet version of its trading portal ICICI Direct. com. Developed using the Silverlight platform, the application allows the customer to trade almost in real time in the equities market. With live streaming quotes direct from the exchange, a customer can place trades and monitor his orders online. The application also contains

snapshot Company: ICICI Securities Project: Portal development using Rich Internet Application technology Project Head: Joydeep Dutta, CTO

an interactive portfolio manager. This section of the application lists down all the trades placed by the customer and provides him with an insight on his current position. Due to the rich Internet application, customers can view streaming quotes and load up to nine different interfaces within the application. Screens that display live quotes do not need to be refreshed. A customer is able to view almost all information needed on a single screen through the implementation of widgets. By providing customers with live streaming quotes and ensuring an enhanced customer experience, the application drives the customer to trade using the new interface. Incidentally, ICICI Securities is the first investment firm in the country to use this technology.

IT consolidation empowers iGATE

GATE made the largest acquisition in the Indian IT sector when it took over Patni Computer Systems in January, 2011. It was clear to the management that that there was a need for common applications across the enterprise with a common IT infrastructure. However, this was a huge challenge as both entities were using different applications and platforms. In order to attain a common platform for both the entities, and to adopt the best practices available across the organization, the team

snapshot Company: iGATE Project: Consolidation of IT infrastructure post merger Project Head: Chella Namasivayam M, CIO

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reviewed and came up with the recommended application architecture and roadmap to be implemented. Teams on both sides had strengths and weaknesses on technologies that were identified and leveraged to ensure provision of the best support structure. The team also made huge usage of open source tools to save time that would be spent in coding. The team used a fast track approach to achieve this massive task within just six months. As a result of this consolidation, the firm saved USD 500K on a year-on-year basis due to platform consolidation. Additionally, the firm saved USD 1.5 million in license cost and AMC over a period of three years due to ERP consolidation. It also achieved 20 percent reduction in manpower on account of unification of teams and integration of systems.

Employee Self Service portal ushers efficiencies

huge conglomerate, K Raheja Corp (KRC) was using legacy system that was not integrated with SAP payroll for time data. Further, data upload from locations including project sites and branches was a manual task. To overcome these issues, the company decided to provide an online portal for employees. The portal has real-time integration with back-end systems like SAP Financials, SAP Human Capital Management & Payroll, Attendance Recording system with Biometric devices, etc. The company selected IBM as the partner for the implementation. Since the time management is fully integrated with the payroll system, it sends the attendance and absence data payroll on a daily basis, which makes reconciliation easy. Leave and Attendance management with necessary approvals are handled through the portal. Biometric devicebased attendance recording system enabled strict controls at branches, which has resulted in an average 2.5-3 percent savings in monthly salary outflow. Additionally, the portal enables complete travel management including travel request, travel service and reimbursement through finance/ payroll. Income tax and investment declaration are also launched on portal with automatic tax calculations and deductions from salary. Generation of Form 16, leave applications, travel requests and reimbursements can also be managed through the portal.

snapshot Company: K Raheja Corporate Services Project: Employee self-service portal Project head: Rahul Vasant Mahajan, AVP â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Information Technology SI/Vendor: IBM

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Ideas @ Work facilitates innovation

large firm, Eaton has engineering centers and IT functions spread all over the world. The firm wanted to tap the intellectual capabilities of engineers and capture their ideas for its ideation process. The firm used to pose a problem statement to its engineering community and gather ideas via e-mail. Eaton wanted to improve this process as it generated only a limited number of ideas, and had no tracking and collaboration among the communities.

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: Web portal for ideation process Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

To resolve this, Eaton created a web-based tool called ‘Ideas@Work’. Eaton India IT deployed this tool in Eaton Engineering Pune as a pilot in Jan 2011 for just 112 engineers from one business group. Sensing the benefits, the leadership team asked IT to deploy this tool to more than 800 engineers. Initially, the process started off with five problem statements. Various cross functional teams in the engineering center from various COE teams participated in generating ideas over one month as against the previous one day event. As a result on an average, 50-60 ideas per challenge were posted on the website. This tool has not only built a disciplined approach in the ideation process, but has also provided the opportunity to build on each other’s ideas. The tool has opened opportunities to enter into new products and markets.

Open Univ provides education to all

nabling computer education in urban poor/rural environment faces several challenges like non-availability of quality education institutes, lack of skilled teaching faculty and lack of certification by the government recognized institutions. Dr Babasaheb Amedkar Open University (BAOU) in Gujarat was looking for a solution to these challenges. The university embarked on project Kamdhenu, which involved developing a low-cost mobile computer lab — Computer Education on Wheels.

snapshot Company: Dr Babasaheb Amedkar Open University Project: Kamdhenu Project Head: Dr Manoj Soni, ViceChancellor SI/Vendor: Kalp Systems

With an aim to provide the students with IT skills, which can help them seek employment, a mobile van equipped with computers, Internet, laser printer and scanner, LED projectors and audio-visual system was introduced. As the bus runs on AC Power, it is self–sufficient and runs on power generated by a diesel generator. The mobile lab offers certificate courses. Anyone who enrols himself for the van, gets the advantage of cost saving, of not commuting to a computer center, and getting a certificate from BAOU. People from lower income groups and those who can’t afford a costly education system are the main beneficiaries. Currently, there are three such vans providing education in various parts of Gujarat and the university is targeting at least one van/district in the state. Each bus covers about 200-250 students daily.

Portal provides business delight for dealers

ahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Ltd (MMFSL) is a leading non-banking finance company in India. The dealer contributes 75 percent of the total business of Mahindra Finance. The firm was using a manual process for dealer trade, enquires, and communication. Since the process is manual, the dealer trade advance and vehicle delivery order takes time, so a dealer loses patience and turns to another bank for the loan. This resulted in loss of customers and business for MMFSL. To overcome these challenges, MMFSL implemented an in-house developed Dealer Portal. The portal was aimed at providing better service, quick trade advance enquiry management and business details. It has improved service standards to the dealers by providing transparency of information; turnaround time was also reduced. The dealer can now download a record of all the business done, for approved and unapproved cases. Because of a simplified user interface on the portal, dealers can easily report a problem or request for information. Apart from quick and improved dealer services, the new portal has also introduced business transparency. The portal has helped in increasing trade advance by 50 percent. Similarly, dealer logins to the portal have increased with a daily average of 200 logins.

snapshot Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services Project: Dealer Portal Project Head: Suresh AS, General Manager - IT

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GE Shipping improves efficiency

he shipping business, in which GE Shipping operates, is quite different from other industries. Operating a large number of ships, the firm needed visibility and control into the operational and financial efficiency of the overall operations. To enable this visibility, the firm built a business MIS system using a Business Intelligent (BI) tool. The system shows real-time status of the organizationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; operational scenario and P&L. The system shows

snapshot Company: GE Shipping Project: MIS system for ships Project Head: Anajan Deb, GM-IT (CIO)

budget planning, which is pulled from granular level of budget figures from the ERP at the beginning of the year, and similarly, an actual figure against each budget line is pulled from the respective applications. Any time budget versus actual status can be drilled down to the lowest level of cost and budget. The IT team also ensured that the users were comfortable using the tool by developing the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s user interface in a similar manner to Excel (the tool which was used earlier). Due to the system, the firm can ensure that all checks and balances are in place. The top management also gets real-time visibility of bottomline. The system has a strong what-if analysis feature. This can be used by the management to easily create different scenarios according to different parameters.

Max Bupa standardizes processes

leading health insurance firm, Max Bupa was facing challenges with manual process in place as it resulted in lack of standard sales and customer service process for group customers. The company was looking for a solution that ensured seamless onboarding of a customer, helped in managing endorsements and gave customers a comprehensive view of their accounts on a real-time basis. In line with its objective, Max Bupa developed Titan. The platform supports workflow capabilities involving sales,

snapshot Company: Max Bupa Health Insurance Company Limited Project: Implementation of Titan Platform Project Head: Pankaj Jain, Head of IT

informationweek october 2012

group pricing, underwriters and customer services team to move quotes of the customer from one team to another. It also supports customizable dashboards to display the work in hand, which helps users in easier tracking of cases, which in turn results in increased productivity. The platform is capable of segmenting sales leads into categories such as strategic, major and immediate, which helps sales team to decide individual strategy for each segment and focus on the right segment. The solution drives standardization by allowing group pricing team to approach group customer insurance requirements in a systematic and consistent manner, enabling a consistent price for each customer for similar requirements. As the processes are automated, it eliminates the scope of any manual intervention, which in turn removes human errors.

Nanavati saves lives with telemedicine

he telemedicine center of Nanavati hospital is the largest telemedicine service provider in Western India. This center provides tele-consultation and tele-education through its network of 34 peripheral rural centers in India and 45 African countries. Since inception, the center has provided over 4,000 tele-consultations and over 100 CME (Continuing Medical Education) program to doctors and paramedics in rural India and Africa. Through these consultations, more than 500 tribals and below poverty-line villagers have been treated successfully at Nanavati hospital by specialists. The hospital has used IT tools of video conferencing/ communication technology-based on ISDN/ broadband/satellite-based connectivity. The hospital has successfully helped over 4,000 patients in rural health centers by specialist consultants over video conference and investigation reports. Treatment has been carried out to over 500 patients, making this center the only one in Western India who has provided over 100 CME lectures for rural hospital medical staff and African countries, training paramedics, nurses, physiotherapists and ICU staff. With over 4,000 tele-consultations and 500 treatments, the hospital has saved approximately ` 1 crore in terms of travel/consultation fees, stay and treatment of patients.

snapshot Company: Nanavati Hospital Project: Telemedicine Project head: Dr. Pavan Kumar, Head - Department of Telemedicine

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Custom solution enables lower TCO

rincipal Retirement Advisors is a dedicated retirement solutions specialist. The firm wanted to set up strategically located business centers across India with top-end facilities aimed at providing its retirement planners with an environment for conducting client meetings, presentations, and other important business events. Accordingly, IBM and Principal Retirement Advisors, jointly planned and architected a custom designed

snapshot Company: Principal Retirement Advisors Project: Technology infrastructure for business centers Project Head: Harish Balakrishna, CTO SI/Vendor: IBM India

solution and operational model. The solution was designed to optimize and integrate various pieces of existing hardware, software and services. A help desk application using messaging services on the cloud was also deployed. In designing the new system the objective was to reduce TCO, and offer hardware and services to Principal Retirement Advisors on an OPEX services model. The new solution introduced certain operational and cost benefits. With the deployment of the new tools, manageability and traceability has improved. There is higher uptime and faster turnaround to resolve issues. 24x7 remote monitoring has resulted in proactive resolution as against reactive mode in the past. And the need for multiple vendor co-ordination and management on a regular basis is eliminated.

EPFO improves process efficiency

eriodic contributions of members covered by Employee Provident Fund, is handled exclusively by the authorized branches of SBI. The existing system of collecting the contributions was largely manually driven, with updations happening much after the contributions had been credited to the EPFO accounts. The need for an integrated system of accounting with in-built validations leading to reliable MIS was keenly felt. For instance, the challans of a given establishment were to be accepted

snapshot Company: State Bank of India (SBI) Project: Web collection system for EPFO Project Head: N. Jambunathan, Chief General Manager (IT)

only at specified branches. The lack of such a system resulted in various problems for all the stakeholders, viz. EPFO, the establishments and the employees. For example, as updation of individual accounts was not in sync with the collections across counters, it led to delays in settlement of claims. To address these issues, SBI proposed a web-based collection system, where establishments would upload the monthly return for all the employees on their rolls for the month. Subsequently, a challan is generated by the website, and a unique identifying number is generated. The establishment can now decide to submit the contribution at any designated branch or through Internet banking. Today, the EPFO site ensures 100 percent data quality, and the distribution of MIS generated is handled centrally.

Automated fault analysis boosts productivity

uminous Power Technologies aimed at achieving 100 percent customer satisfaction by deploying a robust technology for customer service management. As the firm had a wide customer base of about 5 million customers, it was difficult to manage such a large customer base manually. The firm built a customized solution keeping in mind better response time and faster problem resolution, reduction in cost of service, better management of inventory and for providing instant billing to customer. Post deployment, engineer productivity has gone up from four calls to six calls a day. This is because of faster call allocation and monitoring spares requirement with the engineers. There are other benefits such as accurate billing from manual to electronic, payment tracking, and daily pendency report and dashboard for top management, which has helped in better planning. Inventory tracking across 75 service centers has helped in reducing the inventory carrying cost. Warranty tracking has reduced the warranty replacement cost by 60 percent by tracking the false claims. Fault analysis has helped in improving the quality and reducing the failure rate. Productivity improvement and reduction in false claim of warranty has helped in saving 3.5â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4 crore per annum. Similarly, service engineers and staff productivity has gone up by 30 percent.

snapshot Company: Luminous Power Technologies Project: Customer service management Project Head: Virendra Kumar Bansal, Group CIO

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Shoppers Stop standardizes processes Employee portal streamlines HR The project automates multiple hoppers Stop wanted to enforce checklists and granularly implements SStandard Operating Practices processes (SoP) and monitoring tools at its various retail stores to ensure standard practices are followed uniformly. In line with its objective, the company developed a solution on SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft PerformancePoint to implement a checklist or taskbased mechanism for implementing SoPs across the stores and create dashboards for monitoring and auditing compliance.

snapshot Company: Shoppers Stop Project: Standard Operating Practices enforcement Project head: Anil Shankar, Sr. GM - IT

them in the form of tasks and assigns to owners. Completion or adherence is monitored through a detailed drill down dashboard used by central monitoring teams and auditors. Today, post implementation of the project, Shoppers Stop is able to ensure that SoPs are practiced more effectively. Associates, unit managers and auditors are able to find information related to standard practices. The company has the ability to create, update and enforce policies and procedures across stores. Apart from this, the company has been able to standardize task management. The project has also enabled better task management for employees. As a result of this enforcement, SoPs are practiced more effectively, which in turn, helps employees plan the tasks better.

Unified platform simplifies IT support

nvisaging the future growth of Syntel to be three times the current count by 2015, it was imperative for the firm to have a unified platform to manage IT operations globally. To streamline its business service management, Syntel decided to set up a Global Command Center (GCC). This is a managed service provider (MSP) platform, designed and implemented with multi-tenant architecture, with Syntel as a first tenant. It comprises of two tightly integrated sub platforms, the Global

snapshot Company: Syntel Project: Global Command Center (GCC) Project Head: Muralidharan Ramachandran, CIO

informationweek october 2012

Service Desk (GSD) and the Global Network Operations Center (GNOC). The project simplified the discreet IT support processes that were followed across locations and moved to a globally accepted ITIL-based process framework. After the deployment, the overall infrastructure availability to business project improved by 1.15 percent or 510 minutes a month. Syntel consolidated to a single service desk and monitoring console, thus becoming a one-stop-shop for the business/end-users and support members. The company benefited from a capacity gain of 23 FTEs, due to boost in operational efficiency. It also avoided potential revenue losses due to improvement in business service availability by 1.13 percent.

ahindra and Mahindra wanted to streamline manual processing of tasks of many of the HR-related processes like goal-setting, appraisal process, business travel approvals and leave requests. After a lot of planning, the company developed an Employee Self Care portal that brought around 19 different HR processes online â&#x20AC;&#x201D; turning the portal into a single stop for each employee, providing an anywhere, anytime access to transactions, as well as reporting. The workflows requiring approvals like leave and travel were also placed online with the workflow triggering automated mails to the concerned person(s), updating them about the request. Business Intelligence was integrated with the portal, which included providing the senior management with a dashboard for quick viewing and enabling them to generate various operational reports. Employees are now managing most of their HR-related transactions online quite effortlessly, unlike the previous scenario when a lot of time, effort and even cost was wasted in manual paper work. The cost of paper, power and printing linked to manual processing has gone down drastically. Additionally, the time and efforts expended by employees on manual HR-related processes has gone down significantly.

snapshot Company: Mahindra & Mahindra Project: Employee Self Care portal development Project Head: V. S. Parthasarathy, Group CIO, EVP â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Finance and M&A, Member of Group-Executive Board

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Customer solution boosts revenues for TCI

CI Group is India’s leading multimodal integrated supply chain solutions provider with a global presence. It offers logistics and freight services across roadways, seaways, rail and air. It encountered several discrepancies when settling payments with customers. In the absence of a standard Customer Contract Module, users were specifying their own charges that were either in excess of, or less than the rates specified by TCI. And this led to revenue losses from customers who were charged less, and freight deduction (revenue leakage) in cases where customers were overcharged. To correct this, TCI opted for a Centralized Customer Contract Module to capture the customer terms and conditions, as agreed in the contract; this would eliminate customer discrepancies occurring at a later stage.

highlights

snapshot

Revenue leakage has reduced by 30 percent in FY 2011-12

Company: Transport Corporation of India

Outstanding days of debtors have decreased from 107 days to 67 days as the payment realization has increased because of accurate billing

Project: Centralized Customer Contract Module

Before the project,TCI had different contract terms for different customers. So all these were consolidated, and a common customer contract format was created for entering the rates according to different weight range, fixed rates, one time rate and other pre-defined parameters. When all the Customer Contracts were entered, these were linked to the Express Distribution Information System (EDIS), TCI’s intranet application. After deployment, the system

Project Head: Sudesh Jain, Sr. VP - IT

provided consistent customer terms and conditions. End users are not allowed to enter various rates manually, as these are automatically drawn from the Customer Contract Master. This instant data update makes for faster vehicle movement between the booking point and the warehouse. All this has resulted in a significant increase of business revenue. The company has also been able to reduce manpower and telephone costs for following up on outstanding bills.

Portal reduces turnaround time for WeP

ipro e Peripherals (WeP) is India’s leading peripherals manufacturing company that provides customized e-commerce solutions to internal and external business. WeP has a large network of business and service partners all over India. WeP undertook five key initiatives through its portal to provide better services to customers like ASPs (Authorized Service Providers), dealers, resellers, partners and employees. Firstly, it wanted to reduce

the Time of Payout calculation for ASPs, and avoid the manual mistakes. For this, it implemented all the payout calculations online to ensure data accuracy and speed. Secondly, it wanted to reduce the service cycle (turnaround time) for customer replacement of the IFR (Installation Failure Replacement) unit. For this, it had to devise a system to get the defective product back to the factory, analyze the defect or failure, and take action to prevent

highlights

snapshot

Cost savings of ` 2 lakh per month from PAS process in Oracle ASP payout is reduced to 4-5 days/month Increase in sales team’s productivity

Company: Wipro e Peripherals (WeP) Project: Portal for customers, employees, and partners Project Head: Sunitha A, IT Head

this fault in future products. And to overcome such issues and problems it introduced a new IFR Process. Thirdly, it wanted to introduce a systematic approach for monitoring, reviewing and tracking of orders received from enterprise customers and the channel business. This was done through an Enterprise Order Registration process. Fourthly, it introduced the Quick Daily Sales Report Process to increase the productivity of the sales team. The report offers customer details and effective tracking of lead/pipeline details for information on fast/slow moving items. The fifth initiative was PAS or Printer Against Spare, which includes issuing a new printer if the spare part of the printer is very expensive or unavailable.

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Lean approach improves productivity

he Eaton India Information Technology Center (EITC) offers a variety of value-added IT services to its parent, Eaton Corporation. As manufacturing is the core competency of Eaton Corporation, the firm wanted to improve this process. Accordingly, the firm leveraged lean manufacturing processes in IT like Gemba walk to stimulate the process of having a relook at its IT processes. EITC leveraged this in its manufacturing plants to walk its leadership team through its

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: Deployment of Lean management processes Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

existing IT deliverables, processes and IT measures. During this process, the team could identify certain key areas for productivity improvement. For example, the team created a self-service portal on its existing IT intranet, which had detailed FAQs for resolving user queries. After analysis of historical data, the team also found out that software requests were the biggest contributor to increase in cycle time for resolution of IT service request tickets. The team identified areas in the past process, which helped it in drafting a new process. This new process was then shared with the IT Team, as well as end uses through e-mail communication and internal customer forums. This helped the firm in bringing down the cycle time by more than 15 percent. Increased productivity of IT engineers has helped the firm achieve savings of up to ` 2 million.

Custom solution powers K Raheja Corp

Raheja Corp (KRC) has implemented SAP ERP and SAP Business Information Warehousing (BIW) over ERP for meeting the reporting needs and developing business intelligence. While the majority of financial accounting and related MIS reports were tracked on a profit center level, the same was not available in the standard data source for Finance in SAP BW system in 2007-08. Although SAP has brought New GL functionality in ERP in 2005 itself, there had not been a direct data source linked with this to

snapshot Company: K Raheja Corporate Services Project: Custom Data Source implementation Project Head: Rahul Vasant Mahajan, Associate VP â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT

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get New GL reporting in BIW. Hence, to meet the reporting needs, the firm developed custom data source based on New GL tables. However, since this was a custom data source, the load time was running into 12-14 hours. Considering the overall time schedule, the firm decided to schedule this activity on Sundays only. Because of this, the New GL data availability on BW was with a weekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lag. This resulted in delayed reporting to business users. To address this issue, the firm activated the standard data source 0FI_GL_14, which was for New GL in SAP BIW system. No new hardware was required as this was deployed on the same box. The firm also decided to retire the other SAP data source, which was based on classic GL â&#x20AC;&#x201D; this saved substantial process time along with disc space. Today, average data load time taken reduced from 12-14 hours to less than 30 minutes.

KM portal fosters collaboration

he erstwhile Satyam Computer Services (now Mahindra Satyam) had gone through a major transition in the year 2009. During this episode the organization saw a huge movement of associates. The result of this mass exodus resulted in knowledge loss that was impossible to control. Knowledge resided in several knowledge repositories, and in the minds of individuals and subject matter experts, many of whom had exited the organization. KM processes needed to be streamlined and the KM Agenda for business units had to be reviewed with a finer lens. With this objective, the firm established a comprehensive KM Framework with defined methodology and processes. The goal was to implement the KEE (Knowledge Enhancement Experience) Framework, in a phase wise manner to ensure robustness, performance and scalability. Post deployment Mahindra Satyam got a central KM portal that increased collaboration, usage, contribution, and adaptive learning. The new framework enabled centralized governance with metrics and defined roles and responsibilities. This increased the adherence to process and policy. Further, it improved the quality and shareability of the knowledge assets, leading to increased productivity. The firm has realized significant cost savings of 15 18 percent on hardware infrastructure costs.

snapshot Company: Mahindra Satyam Project: KEE framework Project Head: Bheemesh Kumar, Knowledge Management Head

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Storage/DCP/BR

Innovative DR solution raises business continuity standard

he IT team at Infosys is responsible for the management of infrastructure platform hosted in multiple data centers with 900 plus physical and virtual servers, over half a petabyte of storage, nearly 30 million files and numerous heterogeneous technology platforms. Maximizing high availability, building efficient business continuity capabilities with minimal RTO and near zero RPO has always been a key focus area and forms a critical success parameter for Infosys. The entire corporate data resides in two containers — database (structured data) and file systems (unstructured data). Infosys’ conventional data center design was extremely resilient infrastructure with BPC and DR solutions to cater to component failures, storage failures and site failures. However, the RTO was as high as 32 hours

highlights RTO is now less than an hour as compared to 32 hours earlier Infosys is in the process for applying patents for the solution developed in collaboration with Hitachi

and required manual intervention. Additionally, backup window was increasing sharply with data growth and so was restoration time. Infosys innovatively architected and deployed Hitachi Storage Cluster (HSC), Hitachi’s High Performance NAS (HNAS) Metro Cluster, and Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to overcome all the aforesaid challenges on BCP and DR fronts. The HSC deployment broke the conventional shared storage model, and eliminated the shared disk model.

snapshot Company: Infosys Project: Business continuity solution Project Head: Jitendra Sangharajka D, Associate VP & Head, Enterprise Platform Management Group

The solution synchronously replicates data to the second data center and automates the entire disaster recovery process of mapping disks to the cluster nodes in the second data center, in case of a site or storage level disaster. The new solution guarantees business — even in case of a data center level disaster, systems would be up and running in minimal time. Recovery is foolproof and does not require any manual intervention.

Cairn India optimizes backup process

airn India Limited (CIL), with its headquarters in India, is a dynamic, entrepreneurial oil and gas exploration and production company with an exciting and growing portfolio of assets in India and Sri Lanka. The company has around 19 departments that are aligned to four major business units. Its each department was using a shared network drive (Windows NTFS with access control). Since both technical and non-technical teams were storing data at this location,

storage size of this environment was over 30 TB. Also, the estimated annual growth rate of this file system was 30 percent. The burgeoning data caused delays in completing the backup within the planned time. It also increased the possibility of unavailability of data, which was a high-risk situation. Considering the criticality of data protection, the company embarked on a project with two-fold objectives — ensuring

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Backup window has reduced from 6 days to 8 hours The company has been able to protect data size of over 82 TB It has achieved 95 percent deduplication for this backup data

informationweek october 2012

Company: Cairn India Project: Deduplication backup Project Head: Priya Narayanan SI/Vendor: EMC

100 percent protection of businesscritical data as per company policy and building quicker and realistic restoration capabilities. It realized that backup to disc was a reliable and realistic solution to meet the project objectives. Thus, the company partnered with EMC and deployed EMC Avamar, which utilizes matured source-based deduplication methodology. Post deployment, the company has achieved drastic reduction in the time to complete full backups. Earlier, the restoration time was 12 to 24 hours depending on the media availability and data size, whereas today most of the requirements can be fulfilled between 1 hour to 8 hours. Apart from this, the company today has compliance to backup policy.

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DSPBR builds a Tier-3 data center

SP BlackRock (DSPBR) Investment Managers had two offices — one at Maker-6 for the sales staff and one at Malad for Business Continuity Planning (BCP), where the operational cost was high. To tackle this challenge, the company decided to build Business Continuity Management (BCM), Disaster Recovery (DR) Setup as per ISO 27001 and BS25999 frameworks with a new tier-3 data center TIA-943 standard at a new office location.

snapshot Company: DSP BlackRock Investment Managers Project: Building BCM, DR Setup and a new Tier-3 data center Project Head: Srinibash Sahoo, Senior VP and Head – Technology

This project involved consolidation of old offices, along with seamless migration of all IT equipment and technology services to the new data center at Andheri. With this new IT infrastructure, replication of data from the primary data center to the BCP data center happens on a real-time basis, ensuring that the services are available in the BCP site in case primary site goes down partially or fully. Post deployment, the quality and speed of service to DSP BlackRock business has been strongly enhanced, along with quick turnaround time in case of a disaster. Also, the BCP setup technology now ensures faster and secure remote access anywhere, anytime, which gives employees a lot of flexibility. Consolidating the staff and BCP/DR setup in a single location has led to significant cost savings.

Essar improves DR readiness

isaster Recovery readiness is a business driven mandate at Essar. Through the process of designing and implementing DR solutions and testing it, the Essar IT team realized the challenges they needed to address to have a DR plan they could rely on. They wanted to automate the testing and recovery process and thereby minimize the need for experts. To achieve this objective, Essar deployed Sanovi’s solution. The DR solution for SAP on the primary production site consists of a two node

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: Implementation of DR solution Project Head: CN Ram, Group CIO Vendor / SI Partner: Sanovi

cluster with Oracle database and the central instance running on different nodes of the cluster. Sanovi’s software has a built-in file replication module to replicate the application environment and configuration files. The solution has allowed Essar to take a life cycle approach to DR without a subsequent increase in people and training. The team leveraged the pre-packaged recovery workflows to dramatically reduce the amount of time required to deploy the DR solution. Operators are able to do DR drills, without involving technology experts. The real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities enable the team to share the recovery readiness report with the top management. Post deployment, the time to conduct DR drills has gone down by over 90 percent. Today, only one person is able to drive the DR drills without the presence of experts.

DLP solution protects businesscritical data

eing an offshore arm of Hitachi Consulting, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India decided to deploy a robust data leakage prevention tool that could avoid any loss of company and customer confidential data. The company installed Symantec’s Data Loss Prevention Endpoint module. It deployed two-tier architecture and used a virtualized platform for building a redundant and scalable solution. The company has configured policies that alert users whenever a transfer of sensitive data is triggered. The tool also allows the company to identify and protect data based on keywords, patterns, file types and by fingerprinting information in sensitive documents. For instance, even if the user copies/ uploads data from his laptop to an external drive at home, this tool examines the data for sensitive content, and alerts and prevents him if any sensitive information is found. Prior to deployment of DLP solution, the company had a three-member Infosec watchguard team to monitor user activities/logs and server logs, and carry out investigations on basis of deviations. With the help of DLP, the company has been able cut down the team size to one. Post deployment, the firm has improved its ability to secure endpoints inside or outside the corporate network. Simultaneously, it has reduced data breach risks, and saved costs on account of eliminating the risk of legal and compliance issues.

snapshot Company: Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Project: Deployment of DLP solution Project Head: Sesanka Pemmaraju, Director – IS and CISO

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Storage/DCP/BR

Tier III DC provides unique advantage

hen IDFC started putting its thoughts and plans in place for designing a Tier III Data Center (DC), it was facing a huge challenge. In India, not a single entity had gone for a Tier III certification. This initiative was preceded by first achieving the Tier III design certification, which basically involves creating the design on paper and getting it cleared, where the uptime consultants minutely comb through the documents to ensure that no aspect of the concurrent maintainability criteria is

snapshot Company: IDFC Project: Tier III data center certification Project Head: V C Kumanan, Senior Director-IT

missed out. The design certification is a must to even consider applying for the facilities certification. Translation of this design into facilities was an even bigger challenge as this was a live site and any downtime could lead to downtime for the other tenants too. Firstly, the specifications have to be understood correctly by various vendors and this included the DG set fuel line engineers, to electrical contractors and cooling engineers. The innovation in this project was more in terms of a mix of never before tried critical look at the electrical setup and bringing together various vendors to understand and implement the standard. IDFC became the first financial services company in India to be awarded the Tier III Facilities certification for its central data center by the Uptime Institute, USA. This has also ensured uptime of 99.98 percent.

DR boosts productivity at Aegis

egis Group felt the need to have a near disaster recovery site and business continuity plan to provide the business with a robust system. This was needed to provide customers with a seamless service, without any disruption in the event of a disaster. Aegis chose to configure Oracle Data Guard in high availability mode. If the primary site failed, there would be minimal or no data loss and SAP system would be available to the business users without any disruption of services. However, in case connectivity failed

snapshot Company: Aegis Project: Business Continuity Project Head: Manoj Kumar Mittal, Head â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT SI/Vendor: Wipro

informationweek october 2012

between the primary and secondary site, the system would not wait to write on the secondary site. This project went live on January 16, 2011 with Wipro as the technology partner for providing server and configuring replication of data using Oracle Data Guard, while MTNL, Aircel and Spectranet were providers of the connectivity between two sites using lease circuit and Internet lease lines. The new business continuity system put in place helped Aegis reduce the business downtime. The company achieved its main goals of customer and strategic impact, competitive advantage and operational impact. The project helped in better customer service and increased productivity. The firm has gained huge cost savings in manpower costs as there is no idle time for the business users due to downtime.

Deduplication reduces data backup time

MCG major Marico has presence in 50 locations in India and operates 7 offices across different categories. Being a company with diverse presence, it faced several issues in managing its vast infrastructure. The company did not have an organization-wide policy of backup in place. To take a full backup of data over LAN, the company had to spend 2-3 hours â&#x20AC;&#x201D; each user had an average size of nearly 10-15 GB and a major chunk used to be Outlook pst files. In addition, a lot of time was spent on managing the backup generation process. To restore even a single file, the company had to spend a minimum of 1-2 hours. In order to resolve these challenges, Marico decided to implement sourcebased deduplication backup software. The company chose EMC Avamar for implementation. Marico framed a backup policy according to which users were required to segregate data into specific folders for backup. This ensured that big files such as movies, etc., which cannot be compressed to a great extent, were not backed up. Earlier, user data backup was left to user discretion, while now it is taken automatically as per schedule. Today, time taken for backup of each user is around 30 mins per day over LAN and 1 hour over WAN. The company has been able to reduce its previous 125 TB of data to 5 TB, with 96 percent deduplication. It has just one backup administrator managing backups of around 700-800 machines spread across 35 locations.

snapshot Company: Marico Project: Source-based deduplication backup solution Project Head: Girish Rao, Head â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IT

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Premier India deploys DR site

remier India had an Exchange server and domain controller hosted on a co-located space, for which it wanted to have high availability and disaster recovery (DR) site with minimum spend. Prior to deployment of the DR site, the company experienced long downtimes for various maintenance activities. This deployment has helped the company keep the services running 24x7 without any downtime or issues.

snapshot Company: Premier India Project: DR site Project Head: C G Prasad, Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Information Systems

Today, employees are less bothered about downtime for the maintenance of Exchange, which in turn increases the employee productivity and efficiency. The minimum bandwidth required for active sync of the Exchange mailboxes is dedicated minimum 4 Mbps. But, the company was able to achieve the same with 1 Mbps shared bandwidth using the offline sync of mailboxes to initiate DR. This method is being employed first time in the Microsoft practice by the IS partner (HCL Infosystems). The firm has experienced huge cost savings with respect to CAPEX (` 6 lakh) and OPEX (` 10 lakh) per annum. This has enabled the firm to maintain seamless communications with its customers.

DR drives efficiency at Volkswagen

olkswagen India wanted applications running in one data center to seamlessly transit to the other data center, in case of failures. It also wanted to virtualize the physical servers so that servers could be better protected and easily ported. After a thorough evaluation, Volkswagen chose NetApp as it offered a unified storage that could support both near and far DR, and could integrate tightly with its existing VMware virtualized infrastructure. NetApp also provided a rich feature set

snapshot Company: Volkswagen India Project: Storage consolidation and disaster recovery Project Head: Sameer Pise, CIO

including snapshots, thin provisioning and deduplication. With MIEL NetApp MetroCluster, Volkswagen has been able to protect its critical data and achieve near DR at a reduced cost and complexity. Its mission-critical applications can seamlessly failover between data centers without any administrative intervention. The auto major virtualized 63 percent of all its office servers, which resulted in a server consolidation ratio of 1:5. In addition, it migrated all the servers for its sales office in Mumbai to the data center in Pune, which in turn saved expensive hosting costs. With this solution, the firm has achieved a deduplication ratio of 4044 percent, which has resulted in 42 percent savings on power and cooling. Additionally, RPO values have reduced from 24 hours to 8 hours.

Hitachi Consulting reduces backup window

he growth of network file shares, databases and application data drives a constant need for more storage. Storage resources remain trapped behind individual servers because of one-to-one relationship between each server and disk/storage connected to servers. Hence, Hitachi Consulting Software Services decided to initiate a storage consolidation project. Storage consolidation has helped the firm to consolidate multiple file servers, databases and other data sources to a single storage system. The storage consolidation project has helped the firm create a high availability architecture and a consolidated storage asset across multiple OS environments. From multiple network file servers with local storage, the firm has migrated all file servers, databases and other data sources to a single proprietary SAN box. The firm also migrated MS Exchange 2003 server to MS Exchange 2010 using virtualization at all levels, including application servers, exchange database servers and storage units. The firm also moved from a conventional tape-based backup solution to a disk-based solution. All the critical servers are now backed up through Symantec NetBackup using Disk to Disk and then replicated to a warm site using ExaGrid solution. Today, backup window has reduced from 12 hours to just 3 hours. The firm has also reduced disk space by a range of 10:1 to 50:1.

snapshot Company: Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Project: Storage Consolidation Project Head: Sesanka Pemmaraju, Director â&#x20AC;&#x201C; IS / CISO

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Data Center/Networking

Essar optimizes WAN bandwidth

ith operations in more than 25 countries, the Essar Group employs 75,000 people. As business volumes grew, the number of branches and business applications grew. Even as the demands from the Group’s IT infrastructure grew, the response from the applications was poor. Remote offices faced challenges of insufficient, expensive or congested bandwidth. The Group observed high latency in data transfer rates, and faced huge challenges with remote data backup

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: WAN optimization Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

and replication. To overcome these challenges, the Group deployed a WAN optimization solution from Riverbed. Currently, by optimizing only 70-80 percent of the overall traffic at each location, Essar is saving nearly ` 10-14 lakh in bandwidth costs at each location. It believes that once it starts utilizing SSL and Citrix ICA, it can optimize10-15 percent traffic additionally. Hence, the savings will further increase and the payback will be reduced to nearly18 months. Since the performance of apps over the WAN is addressed by the Riverbed, Essar is looking to consolidate its file and mail servers to one-two data centers. This will offer huge cost savings from hardware and software management perspective. The solution has reduced the CAPEX/OPEX expenditure cost of bandwidth upgrade by up to 60 percent.

IOCL transforms network infrastructure

s a diversified transnational energy company, Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) was looking to expand operations pan India. However, its existing network infrastructure was not able to cope with the growth. Sizing was an issue and network choking led to delayed response times. Given the above challenges, IOCL decided to revamp its network infrastructure so that it could support the ever-increasing demand for better user experience and server access. To address this issue, IOCL decided

snapshot Company: Indian Oil Corporation Project: Network infrastructure upgrade Project Head: Projjal Chakrabarty, Executive Director

informationweek october 2012

to deploy the Cisco Nexus series of switches to simplify its network infrastructure and reduce costs, while improving business efficiency. The implementation of the Cisco Nexus solution has enabled IOCL to achieve infrastructure scalability, brought efficiency in power and cooling, improved performance, and supported efficient data center growth. The new network components in the solution have enabled IOCL to roll out many new applications. Services have improved tremendously thanks to zero latency. The new architecture has ensured that every node now has a full 1Gbps speed till desktop. In terms of tangible benefits, the implementation has resulted in reduction in infrastructure costs by 50 percent, reduction in cooling and power costs by 70 percent, and improved business efficiency by 35 percent.

Wireless backbone powers Jindal Steel’s agility

hen Jindal Steel & Power Limited (JSPL) was coming up with a huge integrated steel plant at Angul, it was facing a unique problem. The whole plant was on a project stage. Any fixed communication infrastructure, be it for data, voice or video was out of question. The only possible alternative was a wireless infrastructure. JSPL innovated by using RF technology and achieved realtime data capture and communications in the supply chain. Using RF technology as the backbone, the firm setup the network for the 5,000 acres manufacturing greenfield project. The solution was able to provide the right backbone for the video surveillance network along with data and voice for the integrated steel project. At any point of time, network components can be added easily and new links can be spanned. In the project stage, it often happens that a particular temporary structure is moved from one place to another with its whole setup. In such cases, the network connectivity can be established within a matter of hours. Presently, around 3,000 nodes are in place on primary base on the wireless technology that includes data, IP phone, CCTV and Wi-Fi. The voice part is a free service and is linked with the existing EPABX system to extend with the sites. This is expected to save ` 30 crore in CAPEX and ` 48 lakh in OPEX by the next year. As the firm expands, it is presumed that the employee strength will be nearly 3,000, which will enable savings of ` 30 crore.

snapshot Company: Jindal Steel and Power (Angul, Odisha) Project: Wireless backbone using RF technology Project Head: Rakesh Mishra, Head – IT&C

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K Raheja saves with MPLS connectivity VFS Global deploys global separate Internet connectivity from all Raheja Corp is a group with diverse Kinterests in the realty business, hos- the buildings. But this posed a number MPLS Network pitality sector and retailing outfits. It has a data center at the Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai, where all its business apps are hosted. One of its construction sites at Navi Mumbai has 12 buildings spread over an area of 4 million square feet. There was a need for each building to access the central applications in the data center through reliable and secure Internet connectivity. This requirement was earlier served by providing

snapshot Company: K Raheja Corporate Services Project: MPLS VPN connectivity Project Head: Rahul Vasant Mahajan, Associate Vice President Information Technology

of challenges. It was difficult to control and monitor multiple links. There was frequent downtime due to inconsistent Internet connectivity and threat of virus infections. To overcome these challenges, K Raheja switched to MPLS VPN connectivity. It installed a Sify VPN antenna on the building No. 3, which in turn connects to the HO via MPLS VPN cloud. This connectivity allowed it to cover a distance of 2 kms, without laying any copper/fiber cables. By implementing wireless solution instead of fiber optic solution, the firm has saved ` 36 lakh for CAPEX. There has been direct cost savings of Internet connectivity taken separately earlier for each building at ` 50,000 per building, per year. This saving amounts to ` 7 lakh per year for14 buildings.

Integrated approach yields benefits

he KPIT Cummins IT team was looking for a desktop refresh and simplified migration from the older version of its operating system. The management was expecting to improve the utilization of IT assets, manage exponential business growth, and scale IT infrastructure accordingly. The company wanted to enable employees across the board to easily access corporate data from anywhere and over a broad range of end-user devices without compromising security. Thus, KPIT decided to implement

snapshot Company: KPIT Cummins Info Systems Project: Unified computing infrastructure Project Head: Mandar Marulkar, Head -Technical Infrastructure Management Services and CISO SI/Vendor: Cisco

virtualization at the desktop level instead of refreshing PCs in a traditional way, as was the norm every once in four years. In line with this vision, KPIT adopted the data center architecture and the UCS framework from Cisco along with the VCE Vblock platform. KPIT deployed the Vblock platform for a virtual desktop interface (VDI) implementation to serve 1,200 users across India. The solution brings together the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing and helped KPIT manage the growing deluge of smart devices, data and applications with constrained IT budgets. Today, provisioning and deprovisioning of IT resources for employees can be done in 15 minutes, as compared to a couple of days earlier. The solution has also reduced the need for IT manpower to support end users by 75 percent. Use of thin clients has brought down power consumption to nearly 55 watts from 150 watts.

FS Global serves the interests of 37 sovereign governments in 69 countries worldwide through its 610 plus offices across five continents. VFS-operated Visa Application Centers (VACs) across the globe operate in centralized mode with its data centers in Mumbai and London. Due to the sensitive nature of the data transactions, the information from VACs needs to be transmitted over a secure link. To cater to this requirement, VFS had an ‘IPSec over VPN network’ deployed across the globe with dedicated firewalls installed in each of its offices. In addition to this, some VACs were connected over MPLS circuits. There were several disadvantages with this setup such as no committed SLAs due to varied links; uptimes were not guaranteed; dependency on the Internet cloud which was not “owned” by anyone; and vendor management issues. Consequently, the company decided to opt for a Global MPLS network. A single service provider was contracted to provide connectivity covering various offices of VFS. Deploying a single Global MPLS network has helped in faster provisioning/upgrade of connectivity, which has tremendously reduced turnaround time for project delivery. Since all VACs operate centrally, redundant centralized infrastructure has reduced outages, which in turn has helped reduce recovery time objective.

snapshot Company: VFS Global Group Project: Global MPLS network Project Head: Dhiren Savla, CIO

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Data Center/Networking

Wireless solution powers MVML

ahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Ltd. (MVML), located over 700 acres of land in Pune, constitutes the complete manufacturing facility for Mahindra & Mahindraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entire medium and heavy commercial vehicles. MVML was facing challenges with fulfilling immediate IT network requirements for the ongoing projects, as well as operational needs. To tackle this issue, MVML decided to implement a wireless solution, called the Campus Wireless Solution, to host all the IT services and applications with

snapshot Company: Mahindra Vehicle Manufacturers Project: Campus Wireless Solution Project Head: Michael Dsouza, Manager

zero downtime. The key benefit of this solution was 24x7 availability and uptime of all IT resources and services centrally and ability to access connectivity and IT services on-demand. Due to satisfactory working over appreciable LAN and WAN services, the completion of timebound activities is now being done conveniently, leading to better outputs and deliverables. Also, proactive monitoring of all critical services with a centralized NOC setup has helped in narrowing the production downtime to nearly zero, whereas earlier on an average there were around four such downtime instances. Today, new service provisioning and handovers happen within 4 hours, while with the conventional approach it used to take three weeks. Post deployment, the company has been able to save ` 90 lakh.

How IOCL improved app performance

he Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL) is the 18th largest petroleum company in the world, and is included in the Fortune 500 listing. As the organization grew, and the number of users requiring access to the company data increased, its servers could not cope with the higher traffic volumes. IOCL also had challenges in ensuring optimum application availability for about 10,000 users across India, and in its overseas branches. There was no redundancy plan in place; if the network crashed all the applications would

snapshot Company: Indian Oil Corporation Project: Deployment of Application Delivery Controller solutions Project Head: Projjal Chakrabarty, Executive Director, Information Systems

informationweek october 2012

be affected, impacting the business severely as all the servers and services would need to be restored manually. Access management duties became very time consuming, as 35 public IP addresses were necessary to support its employees, distributors, and customer portals. To overcome these challenges, IOCL opted for the F5 BIG IP Application Delivery Controller solution. IOCL and F5 built a next-generation application delivery framework, which is context and location aware, and can mitigate/block unwanted users from accessing IOCL portals. The solution has helped IOCL bolster IT efficiency. Post deployment, bandwidth use has reduced by 80 percent, while annual operational expenditure has reduced by about 20 percent. Also, CAPEX has reduced due to the ability of BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to offload SSL certificates and SSL processing.

Enterprise communication system saves costs

s Mindlance operates offices across the globe, it calls for a massive connectivity system and resources for provisioning the base physical layer connectivity, connecting all the branches, service production centers and management headquarters. Since the geography spanned globally, the system had to provide seamless interconnectivity between the different telecom standards (E1 in India and T1 in the U.S.), and the different types of media based on technologies that various service providers offer like Ethernet over DSL, E1, OC1, DS3 and STM (dynamically capable of upgrading to any STM series). Mindlance set about building the network that would support uniform intelligent call switching, routing and data integration. A massive dial plan on the lines of the International Telecom Union (ITU) standards was designed. Just like the ITU standard, the suffixes as per country/city/branch were put in place. This meant that a huge increase in capacity could be done without having to change the dial plan. Mindlance got itself allotted levels for each communication channel in all the locations. Hence, any change in service providers did not result in the change of numbers. Post deployment of the system, OPEX cost has decreased by 34 percent, while scalability has increased by 400 percent. Mindlance has also recorded increase in the overall revenue by 25 percent. Apart from this, employee productivity has increased by 28 percent.

snapshot Company: Mindlance Project: Enterprise communication system Project Head: Kamal Sharma, Group CIO

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Unified Communications/Video conferencing/enterprise communications

Allergan India goes for Virtual Connect

llergan India believes it’s a big challenge for a pharmaceutical company to meet/address the needs of its customers and employees spread across various geographies. Therefore, the company was looking at an innovative way of meeting its customers and employees virtually. The objective was to get a first-hand feel of a virtual presence during the meetings. Some of the needs identified for this initiative were enabling virtual communication with key customers, partners and suppliers; conducting regular virtual meetings with longdistance employees; ability to launch products virtually to reduce the travel cost; and launching and monitoring campaigns closely. To achieve this, it has setup a high-end VC equipment, which can handle 8-party conference calls with other locations with point-

highlights Approximately ` 20 lakh saved per year around HR recruitment Approximately ` 10 lakh saved per product launch, and ` 5 lakh saved per product campaign

snapshot Company: Allergan India Project: Virtual Connect Project Head: Karthi V. Manager – Information Services

Approximately ` 15 lakh saved for quarterly review

to-point equipment. Bangalore is connected with a 3 MB link and other locations with a 1 MB link (1:1). One of the key areas of the project was the interoperability between the VC equipment. The company went ahead with the open system, which can handle calls with equipment of any other make. The present system can handle calls from any VC equipment, VOIP calls, and calls from softwarebased solutions, and even multi-party calls.

Allergan has reaped several benefits with its Virtual Connect project. Earlier, from the HR recruitment point of view, candidates from multiple locations were invited to Bangalore for interviews and the travel charges were reimbursed to the candidate. Now, the candidate walks to the Allergan Zonal office, connects VC to Allergan Bangalore, and the interview happens in 30 minutes at no cost. Others locations are connected through third-party VC suits.

eView improves employee communications

s a huge conglomerate, the Essar Group was facing a huge challenge in effectively communicating to its huge employee base of 75,000 people, located in more than 25 countries across five continents. To streamline employee-related communications, Essar launched eView with the objective of keeping the employees updated with the latest information. eView was designed to be in the form of an online streaming portal, which would broadcast

updates. To support this initiative, Essar built an in-house studio, which served as a central resource catering to the communication needs of all the business verticals. The content and workflow for the network was generated and coordinated by the HR teams in conjunction with business verticals, location and the branding team. The studio setup and distribution was done through a content management system.

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The Group has already achieved 1,300 minutes of coverage, 7 programs on-air which are broadcasted across 6 locations Employees can view the events on-the-go, as well on their iPads

Company: Essar Group Project: Online employee communication platform - eView Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

Today, eView is used to share organizational news, employee communications, leadership views and features programs relevant to the work and social environment of Essar. The content is generated by employees through updates from multiple locations, enabling employees to stay updated on activities through their colleagues. This medium covers shows across various spectrums, be it in the form of news bulletins, CSR activities, HR-related events or lighter subjects like family day. This also serves as a medium for the promoter-directors to send out messages and for the senior management to communicate effectively with the employees. This platform has strengthened communication across the Group through live updates and real-time information dissemination.

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Unified Communications/Video conferencing/enterprise communications

Eaton gains from telepresence

t Eaton Corporation, employees had to travel frequently for team meetings and training sessions, which was leading to an increase in travel costs incurred by the company. Eaton wanted to implement a highquality audio and video solution, which would cost-effectively enable employees to share, collaborate and interact in a real-time environment. After evaluating a lot of solutions, Eaton decided to implement highdefinition telepresence systems.

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: Implementation of Telepresence solution Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

The solution has reduced the overall operational costs and administrative overheads involved in arranging visas, travel and stay of the participants. The solution is enabling employees to collaborate with various locations across the globe. This is helping the company in taking quick decisions, which in turn has enabled the firm to introduce or release products faster. Eaton is witnessing an increased interest amongst employees to use the telepresence solution for purposes that previously required travel. This is also resulting in great improvement in employee productivity due to the huge amount of time saved on travelling. The firm has already realized cost savings of ` 2.21 crore. The solution will soon integrate desktops and mobile devices using clients like OCS and Cisco Jabber.

Essar unifies diverse communications

s Essar expanded across the globe, there was a definite requirement of a centralized voice communication platform. This was a big challenge as the firm used different technologies on different platforms. To ensure a smooth business user experience, Essar wanted to standardize technologies. It wanted a system that could integrate its existing infrastructure and also move towards the new IP Phones and UC components like messaging, conferencing and presence. As the Avaya Aura platform was based on SIP,

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: Avaya Aura Implementation Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, CTO

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informationweek october 2012

and had the capability of centralizing applications, the firm decided to go for Avaya Aura for implementation within the Essar Group. The implementation was designed considering three major factors namely CUG implementation, geo redundant architecture and mobility. The scope of this project included the entire communication setup across more than 25 countries in five continents. With Avaya Aura, conferencing is centralized with single number access from anywhere. This is supported by web conferencing and recording features. Essar has also designed the system in such a way that business continuity is ensured during natural calamities using a geo redundant architecture. Essar has already realized cost savings of ` 5 crore per month related to STD and ISD PSTN charges. It has also witnessed 8 to 10 percent increase in productivity.

Mindlance slashes IT infrastructure costs using cloud

s Mindlance operates 16 locations across four countries, it had a complex IT infrastructure. The companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s management wanted to integrate and consolidate IT across the locations. Thus, the company decided to move to Microsoft cloud platform. The company customized CRM for funnel and order management process transfer, which helped it to keep a strong integration with ERP. Mindlance customized SharePoint to create an online portal to track knowledge base, attendance, appraisals and employee transfers. The company provided Exchange 2010 over cloud as the e-mailing solution and CRM and SharePoint were made available with access in Outlook to ensure ease of use. Apart from this, the company opted for Lync and Intune for delivering virtual meetings. Post deployment, the company has reduced IT support cost by 40 percent and travel cost by 30 percent. Further, it has registered reduction in service desk support requests by 40 percent. By deploying this solution, the company has integrated all support and business functions and ensured 99.7 percent availability. As the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mobile workforce can work from anywhere, employee productivity has increased by 7 to 8 percent. It has also succeeded in reducing telecom costs by 25 percent, and Internet and intranet bandwidth costs by `15 lakh per annum.

snapshot Company: Mindlance Project: Collaboration and communications cloud project Project Head: Kamal Sharma, Group CIO & ITIM SBU Head

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VC enables Marico to slash travel costs UC boosts productivity at conferencing (VC) devices along with s a FMCG major, Marico has more connectivity. Athan 50 locations in India and Essar operates seven offices globally. Since the company has multiple locations, employees were required to travel to international offices for meetings. This resulted in the loss of employee productivity as a meeting of one day meant almost three days of time away from office. To tackle the issue of the loss of employee productivity, the company decided to implement video

snapshot Company: Marico Project: Video conferencing Project Head: Girish Rao, Head - IT

However, on doing an analysis of its VC usage, the company found that VC’s full potential was not being realized as it could be used only for conducting interviews from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai — and there were a number of candidates from the other cities. To tackle this issue, the firm connected its VC network to the Reliance Webworld network. This extended the company’s VC network to around 200 locations. The implementation has enabled the company to reduce CO2 emissions at the rate of 250 kg per flight hour. The company has been able to reduce total flying hours — 6 hrs per international VC and 2 hrs per national VC. This has resulted in savings of ` 8,000 per VC domestic and ` 20,000 per VC international. In totality, the company has been able to save ` 93.8 lakh.

Wipro links up with Microsoft Lync

o enhance its Enterprise IM (Instant Messaging) infrastructure, Wipro Technologies decided to use the Microsoft Lync solution. Prior to deployment of Lync, although Instant Messaging was enabled for all the users, only a small segment of users were enabled for audio and video services. Post deployment of Lync, Wipro achieved extended text-only based IM to audio/video collaboration, as well as desktop and application sharing with the conferencing facility. Today, Wipro can conduct keyword-

snapshot Company: Wipro Technologies Project: Deployment of Lync Project Head: Ramesh Nagarajan, CIO

based searches to locate the right skills. It can use resource and advance presence information to initiate ondemand communication. Through Lync, Wipro can extend IM services to federated partners as well. This has helped employees significantly. Now users can communicate and collaborate impeccably while they are outside the corporate network. Complete Lync infra was deployed on a virtual platform and consolidated some of the Lync roles. This has helped in saving of USD 80,000 on hardware alone. Other interesting statistics include 15,000 applications sharing on Lync, 20,000 minutes of voice usage over Lync, and 10,000 conferences between users from various locations and countries per week. In the last three months, there has been an increase of 35 percent in users’ login and also in the number of conferences. Today, Lync is being accessed by 52,000 users.

he Essar Group has a global footprint that spans different continents. Essar needed a more cost-effective communications solution for its geographically dispersed employees. The company was looking for rich functionality and features to increase the use of unified communications within departments. So, Essar opted for Microsoft Lync 2010, which was implemented on the Microsoft HyperV Virtualization platform on IBM Blade matrix. Essar’s Lync Server impacted the company’s overall productivity by reducing communication gaps and pitfalls. After deploying this solution, Essar employees can now hold one-on-one or ad hoc video conferences from their computers, from anywhere. They can easily open a desktop or application session during a video conference to share illustrations, or open a whiteboarding session to take notes. The primary business requirement for this solution was cost control. Integrated audio, video, and web conferencing has reduced travel costs, as well as the costs of third-party conferencing solutions. The solution provides access to enterprise voice, enterprise messaging, and conferencing from one simplified interface, thereby improving productivity. Operational efficiencies have been improved by integrating unified communications and rich presence into business workflows, this enables the company to reduce latency and delays.

snapshot Company: Essar Group Project: Implementing Lync infrastructure Project Head: Jayantha Prabhu, Chief Technology Officer

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Document Management/MPS

Cairn India slashes printing costs

airn India, one of the largest private exploration and production companies in India, was facing several issues with its printing system. As it was using printing devices from various brands like HP, Epson and Canon, and separate copiers, scanners and printers, the manageability of these devices was a challenge. Also, contracts for managing these devices were with different vendors for annual maintenance contract and consumables. There was no reporting system to monitor wastage of paper and cartridge and unclaimed printouts at the printers. To resolve all these printingrelated issues, the company opted for Managed Document Services from Canon. It implemented Canon MultiFunction devices (MFD) with Uniflow software, which helps to provide rule-

highlights 20 percent cost saving on printing and 48 percent asset reduction Reduction in the usage of paper (5 lakh annually), which resulted in saving 60 trees and reduction in 60 tons of carbon emission

based printing and manage/control usage. Today, printing is controlled for authorized users with the access card system. Access cards are provided on each printer and users have to swipe for collecting printouts, photocopies or scanned documents. Alternatively, user can login to the printer in case the access card is not available. This has resolved the issue of unclaimed printouts. It also allows anywhere printing — users can pick up prints

snapshot Company: Cairn India Project: Secure printing Project Head: Priya Narayanan, DGM - Information Services

from any printer by swiping the access card. By introducing the option to cancel the prints at user’s discretion at the printers, the company has been able to reduce paper wastage. Post deployment, the company has reduced overheads by leasing with one vendor and one model. It has one device to address all needs — copying, scanning and printing. As the company has hired printers on a lease basis and pay per click option, there is no hassle of maintaining the assets.

DMS provides secure access to documents

BI Funds Management Private Limited (SBIFM), is a leading fund house in the country with an investor base of over 5.8 million, and over 20 years of experience in fund management. SBIFM is a joint venture between The State Bank of India and Amundi, a leading fund management company. At SBIFM, all departments generate or receive a large number of important documents. There is a lot of critical information exchange

between individuals and departments. However, SBIFM did not have a secure central repository; the documents were handled manually, and that was affecting decisions. Also, there were issues related to audit and compliance requirements. There was a business need to digitize and secure internal records and documents. The search had to be real-time, and based on keywords and parameters. SBIFM wanted to achieve process automation with a primary

highlights

snapshot

Around 25 percent reduction in cost

Company: SBI Funds Management Project: Document Management System Project Head: Subhojit Roy, Head - IT/ VP SI/Vendor: Datamatics Global Services

Status of running process can be easily tracked and monitored by senior management

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focus on the approval processes. It also required to adhere to the legal compliance requirements in an efficient manner. Thus, SBIFM and its integration partner Datamatics Global Services, undertook a project to develop a Document Management System (DMS) for the legal, as well as the product development department. The solution resulted in the creation of a central secure repository to store digital documents; this saved a lot of time in physically searching specific content and related documents. Proper role-based access control logic has ensured security and confidentiality of the critical documents. Since all the documentation and escalations, including TAT for various activities are built into the system, it ensures that the entire process is completed in a secure and time-bound manner.

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JCT Limited enhances file management Image archival boosts uploading to fetching the documents. CT Limited, one of the leading It ensures document security as a Jmanufacturers of textiles and productivity filament yarn, was looking for a solution to manage documents and ensure their ease of accessibility. In line with its objective, the company deployed a document management system, which aids a user to access his files anywhere in the JCT network. The system includes various masters, transactions and reports to cover the whole process flow from

snapshot Company: JCT Limited Project: Implementing Document Management System Project Head: Rajeev Baksshi, G.M (IT)

user can read, write or delete a document as per the rights given to him. Post deployment of the system, the company can categorize documents according to their type with a single location for all its documents. It allows users to download documents anytime. The system also allows the owner of the file to give permissions to his colleagues. Since a copy of the document is on the server, the files are protected from accidental deletion and hardware failure. In addition, using this system, the documents can be uploaded with keywords and other details, which makes it extremely easy to search the documents.

Lowe Lintas consolidates media assets

owe Lintas India is one of the largest advertising and media companies in India. The company was facing a major issue â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all its valuable media assets (video and print ads) were distributed across various brand teams. A person had to go through multiple discussions with respective brand teams to locate specific ads and eventually depend on the production team to retrieve the ad and avail it in a usable format. To eliminate such people dependencies and to consolidate all

snapshot Company: Lintas India Private Limited Project: Internet-based application for storage and retrieval of media assets Project Head: Pravin Savant, CTO

the media assets in a central location for convenient storage, archival and retrieval of all the media assets, the company built a secure Internetbased application called the Vault. The employees can access the application from anywhere, anytime. It is built on SharePoint 2010 with the database being MS SQL 2008. Currently, the application has 24 years of video and print ads completely tagged and easily searchable. With Vault, one can search and retrieve ads based on brand, client, and industry category or industry subcategory. Since the system enables the employees to find the media assets created by the organization in an easier manner, it translates to employees providing better and faster service to the customers. Also, since this is an Internet-based application, it is helping employees in saving the turnaround time for their clients.

eading retail firm, Globus faced a huge challenge in monitoring and capturing relevant designs, which were in the form of images. As these images were scattered across designers, tailoring teams, and also in various physical documents and Excel sheets, the team faced an issue in quickly retrieving these images. As the entire process was manual, the process of retrieving an image used to be time consuming. Additionally, as every department followed its own process, there was no standardization. The firm found it extremely difficult to accommodate the requirements of all the teams and develop a uniform acceptable process. To resolve this issue, the firm decided to develop an image repository system, which would act as a repository of designs that could be available for reference at any given point in future. Today, as a result of the image repository system, the firm has been able to save a huge amount of time in coordination efforts between the design studio and the buyer team. Further, due to perfect analysis of each design in the system, the production time has come down significantly. This in turn, has helped in increasing sales. As every image is seen online, the time for production for repeat styles is down from three weeks to one week.

snapshot Company: Globus Stores Project: Image repository system Project Head: Meheriar Patel, CIO

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Open Source

DSCI streamlines patient management RCom’s journey towards open this manual patient management elhi State Cancer Institute (DSCI) process and develop an Electronic Dis a super specialist hospital source equipped with the state-of-the art technology for cancer patients. DSCI was facing a major problem with its traditional OPD (Out Patient Department) system, which involved manual head-counting of the patients and routing them to the concerned OPDs. As on an average 500 to 600 patients visit this hospital daily, manual management was a huge challenge. To tackle this, DSCI decided to re-engineer

snapshot Company: Delhi State Cancer Institute Project: Electronic Queue Management System Project Head: Surinder Kapur, Consultant (IT)

Queue Management System (EQMS) based on open source software. The application has been developed with Ubuntu at the front-end & SQL Server at the back-end with Tomcat Server. With EQMS, each patient’s data is recorded and a barcode is generated, which is handed over to the patient. Every time the patient comes to the hospital, he/she has to get this barcode scanned based on which a token is provided that contains details like name, time of arrival, date, patient ID, OPD number, waiting number, etc. Simultaneously, the system sends an alert in the record room informing the staff on-duty to take out the concerned patient’s file and send it to the designated OPD. An alert is also sent to the respective OPD informing the doctor about the arrival of a patient.

Eaton optimizes product development

he Engineering Research & Development Center for Eaton India Information Technology Center (EITC) based in Pune, offers testing for a variety of Eaton products under the development phase. Using high-end desktops, engineers ran complex simulations to test various aspects of products under different environmental conditions. This was lengthy and timeconsuming in nature, and took many days to complete. Time for testing played a vital role in launching these products in the global markets. Due to

snapshot Company: Eaton Corporation Project: High Performance Cluster Project Head: Viswanathan Krishnamurthi, VP - Corporate IT (APAC)

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insufficient infrastructure capabilities, engineers were not able to meet the deadline of various critical projects, thus delaying the launch of the product. In order to meet Eaton’s aggressive growth goals, the IT team proposed and implemented a High Performance Computation (HPC) setup. The solution offers a variety of features like parallel processing, cluster computing, and high speed interconnect for faster data transfer and redundancy, which helped Eaton to solve common business challenges, innovate new products faster, increase revenues, and comply with industry regulations. With HPC, engineers are now consistently able to save 75 percent of their execution time on each simulation. Post deployment, the company has realized cost savings of ` 50,00,000 per year due to the reduction in cost of investment for high-end desktops for engineers.

eliance Communications (RCOM), one of India’s largest telecom companies, has been making extensive use of open source software in place of proprietary products to promote open standards and facilitate plug and play in IT operations. RCom is required to maintain a large IT infrastructure both at data center and user desk side to meet its business requirements. To manage operations of its scale, it was essential for the company to have a standardized technology stack. To ensure this, RCOM opted for open standards so that it can benefit from the huge talent pool in the open source ecosystem, while contributing to it simultaneously. RCom evaluated key areas of operation for their suitability of deploying open source software. The key areas identified were client side software (Desktop operating system, mail client, office suite, virtual desktop and project management tools); Data Center applications (Sever OS, proxy software and other intranet applications like FTP, DHCP, DNS, file server, print servers); Network Management System (NMS) to remotely monitor and manage network links and devices; and web hosting applications for the internal and external websites. Post deployment of open source solutions, RCom has been able to improve transaction speed in retail outlets and save 12-15 percent of the annual budget.

snapshot Company: Reliance Communications Project: Open source Project Head: Alpna J Doshi, CIO Reliance Group