Sanjeev Gupta CTO,
Obi Worldphone
Enterprises across business verticals recognise the role that information and communications technology (ICT) plays in their day-to-day functioning. An enterprise requires robust IT and telecom infrastructure to communicate not only with its customers but within the organisation as well. Driven by the need to ensure effective communication, reduce downtime, improve productivity and increase efficiency, enterprises are stepping up their investments to upgrade their ICT infrastructure. With the rapid proliferation of smart devices and the launch of faster networks, the most significant trends that have emerged are the adoption of mobile, analytics and cloud technologies. Leading enterprises in the sales and distribution industry discuss their IT strategies, emerging technology trends and future plans for IT infrastructure upgradation…
What are the technology changes that are shaping the sales and distribution functions across enterprises?
There have not been any major technological changes in the past few years that I have been involved with the distribution industry. The industry is still based on a buy-in-bulk and sell-in-bulk model. The distribution industry, not necessarily the end-user sale segment, is still heavily focused on building relationships. Therefore, in many ways, the job of the IT team has not been to support the function but only to monitor it. Decisions are taken outside the automated framework and applications like supply chain management (SCM) and vendor management are deployed to implement the decision taken. This is true for distribution industries across Europe and Asia. While this is true for the offline industry, the online distribution channels have leapfrogged in term of technology adoption. Since the online industry is building its systems from scratch, it has the luxury of bringing in newer technology. For example, the offline industry still does the majority of its payments through the traditional banking channels, not through the online transfer of money. On the other hand, the online channels thrive on online payment gateways.
What is the company’s telecom and IT blueprint? What new IT infrastructure has it deployed?
Our IT needs are similar to what enterprises in general require. The role of our IT infrastructure is to enhance productivity and efficiency. We have put in place applications such as ERP, messaging and customer relationship management (CRM). We use the Google Public Cloud service for emails and messaging, and private cloud services for hosting our CRM and ERP applications. In addition, we have deployed certain applications for sales force automation. Our SCM is done through ERP based on cloud. We have two data centres hosted on the private cloud, one in Delhi, which covers India, and the other in Singapore, which caters to the rest of the world. We are centralising most of our IT set-up in terms of servers and software. Typically, our employees use a browser or a mobile phone. We do not really push the use of applications among employees. Our main focus over the past six months has been on finding ways to take data out of desktops/laptops and push it to our data centres. So, if one of our sales managers loses his laptop, there is a loss of physical assets, but no data or productivity loss because everything is on our private cloud.
What advantages has the company gained from the new set-up? What were the challenges in implementing the new infrastructure?
In deploying new technologies we have learnt that an IT set-up that works in the US may not work in other geographies. For instance, we are currently expanding our operations into Latin America. We have faced regulatory challenges related to data retention and security. In other countries, we have issues with how to manage the ERP. Some countries mandate that ERP data should stay within the country, so one cannot use a global database to drive ERP.
What are the company’s future plans regarding the upgradation of its telecom and IT infrastructure?
We are currently in our first build-out phase. Therefore, every new technology that we deploy is an upgrade. The distribution industry has always been a low-margin industry. Therefore, the idea is to cut costs by improving productivity. Our IT and telecom expense is significantly above the industry average and we see that continuing for some time. In the near term, we want to transition to a framework where office presence would not affect an employee’s productivity.
“The distribution industry has always been a low-margin industry. Therefore, the idea is to cut costs by improving productivity.” Sanjeev Gupta
