Bajaj Electricals To Align Business Needs With IT

Bajaj Electricals operates through a comprehensive network of branch offices, dealers, distributors, retail chain outlets and service franchisees across India. The company is progressing at a rapid pace and recently, completed the first phase of evaluating its business processes. Biztech2 spoke to Pratap Gharge, VP and CIO, Bajaj Electricals, to get a better understanding of the company’s plans to align business needs with the IT infrastructure.

How does the top management assure that the IT architecture is in sync with the five business units at Bajaj Electricals?

For this, we have framed an IT Task Force headed by our executive director and the team including the CFO, head of commercial department, heads of other support functions and myself.

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We hold a monthly meeting to review the ongoing IT initiatives and how should they be prioritised. Apart from this, there is a strategy meet of each of the five business units in the first month every year, which is attended by the IT department to understand the pain areas of the past year.

Finally, the IT department holds a meeting and mulls over all the pain areas faced by the business units to come up with recommendations, based on which IT budgets are sanctioned.

How has the networking infrastructure been scaled up, considering that Bajaj Electricals operates a country-wide network?

Bajaj Electricals runs operations through twenty branches across the country that are connected via converged network of point-to-point lease lines to our data centre in Mumbai. The branches in metro cities are connected on 500 kbps lines followed by tier I cities on 128 kbps. Small branches in Raipur, Wardha etc are networked through 64 kbps lines. Our six godowns and twenty branch godowns are connected on Tulips Wireless VPN on 16 kbps, as there is not much data traffic to handle.

We have two leased lines for Internet; one for employee usage and the other to connect the dealers and suppliers to the company through their respective extranets.

Very soon the company’s central data centre will shift to Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge Centre. How do you plan to eventualise a smooth transition?

The data centre will be shifted during Diwali holidays. There will be a three-day downtime. But before we physically shift the hardware, they will be tested for connectivity and various other configurations. We will make sure that the hardware is shipped after being dismantled in the right way.

Could you comment on the recent IT innovations at Bajaj Electricals?

We have developed a customer care software to enhance our information gathering about after sales service. Bajaj Electricals operates 250 outsourced after sales service centres across India. The customer care software to be used at these centres will allow the company to capture the business information of the service centre.

The software is offline; however there is a ‘synchronise to central server’ functionality that allows the user to get online four times a day and transfer the call-logs to the central server. It will enable information gathering about customer interaction and customer product failure analysis.

The company also plans to route all the calls received at the call centre and stored on the central server to the franchisees they were assigned to.