"50% Of Our Budget Is Spent On Acquiring New Applications"

Honda Siel is aggressive about its IT investments in 2008 and plans to consolidate older applications with newer technologies to drive the growth. Hilal Isar Khan, IT head, Corporate IT throws more light on the company’s plans to use IT to drive business growth.

What are the recent IT initiatives at Honda Siel?

As far as IT infrastructure and investment at Honda Siel is concerned, we have divided it into three major types. They are application, support infrastructure and networking and communication.

As far as application part is concerned, we are in the process of rolling out two major systems. One is dealer management system to collaborate our dealers and the other is supplier management system to collaborate our suppliers. We have chosen Satyam as our implementation partner and IBM as the hardware vendor to support us in setting up our infrastructure.

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We are using RFID technology for the last one year and have taken the help of our parent company Honda Motors to deploy the RFID solution.

As far as communication is concerned, the company has deployed WAN optimisation solution from Citrix.

Could you tell us about your internal IT team and the innovations being carried out by them?

A lot of innovations have taken place at our organisation with the help of our internal IT team and many applications have been developed to take better and quicker decisions in the business process. We have more than 30 people working under our IT department. The entire work flow management solution has been conceptualised by our IT teams; after that we have taken the help of third party to deploy some of the solutions.

Apart from that, our internal team members are very close to our users and processes, so they are in a better position to realise the need of our employees as far as IT infrastructure, usage and technical know-how are concerned. They are helping our implementation partner understand our typical problems. We have also outsourced some of the services to third party vendors.

How do you plan to use IT to enhance your business operations in 2008?

Our first priority is to connect our dealers across 65 locations, as well as the newly appointed ones in the coming days. Honda Siel is now planning to increase the number of dealers to 100.

Though we are partially using Business Intelligence applications, we are now consolidating it and are in the process of evaluating a good vendor in the BI space. We are also planning to consolidate Product Life Cycle Management and Information Lifecycle Management solutions for our organisation.

The use of documents is extensive in nature and the need, time and cost of operations are compelling us to think about document management solution. It is now essential for us to give authorisation to our specific employees for various kinds of documents and to decide which kind of documents should be preserved and which be deleted or scrapped. We are also working to deploy a full fledged disaster recovery solution in the coming year.

What enterprise technology do you think is the most important for Honda Siel?

It is not any specific technology which is important to us at Honda Siel; rather a whole bunch of technologies are important for us. We are not investing for the sake of investment but for the sake of business demands and to remain competitive in the car manufacturing industry.

There are two kinds of investments taking place at our end - regular investment and revenue or capital expenditure. As far as capital expenditure is concerned, we invest in new applications, infrastructures and networks. 50% of our total budget goes into acquiring new applications and the rest 50% into networking, storage, communication and other areas of IT.

What criteria do you follow while choosing an implementation partner?

As far as selecting an implementation partner is concerned, we decide them on the basis of our requirements and some criteria like quality, cost, delivery, support and management. On the basis of these criteria, we have selected IBM and Satyam for our two big projects.