Hathway Flies With Oracle's E-Business Suite

Cable TV services company Hathway is implementing Oracle’s E-Business Suite 11i.10. The move is part of Hathway’s initiative to improve customer service, compliance and resource allocation to achieve reduced operating costs, and connect all their disparate systems to bring in efficiency and streamlined workflow.

Rajesh Brid, head, Systems, Hathway, spoke to Biztech 2.0 regarding the implementation, some of its already visible benefits and what the future holds for Hathway.

Disparate systems cause of concern

Customer billing was always an area of concern for Hathway, due to their disparate systems, which were a combination of Tally and Excel.

As Brid explains, “Our main issue earlier was that our Tally and Excel systems were not integrated across our branch offices, which led to a lot of unnecessary sending of data back and forth from office to office. This prompted us to pursue a more concrete, scalable, integrated, and flexible solution.”

Oracle - The perfect choice

When asked as to why Hathway chose Oracle, Brid said, “The answer lies in the kind of goals that we are trying to achieve, and the business requirements we had.”

Hathway spent four 4 months, extensively benchmarking various solutions like those from SAP, Oracle, JDE, Baan, etc. Eventually, Oracle and SAP were zeroed down. Although, SAP had its key strengths in areas like manufacturing, Oracle turned out to better suit Hathway’s needs, said Brid.

“It was important for us to manage our users, and our database had to be strong enough to cater to the ever increasing subscriber base. Oracle is quite scalable, so one of our needs gets satisfied here. Since we’ve gotten out of our legacy, we now have access to a complete integrated database; scalable, flexible, and sturdy.”

Successful implementation of Phase I

The company has already completed the first phase of the implementation, executing key modules such as purchasing, stores and inventory management, accounting and financials, across its operations.

“We are 2 months into the first phase, so we’re just taking baby steps as of now. However, we can already see tremendous changes. Everything is transparent now, and accessible with a single click. We also have access to a dashboard of data, which gives us valuable insights in terms of customer trends. We can also now find the details of systems in every location, how they are distributed, and what kind of performance they are giving.”

Phase II, which according to Brid will be completed sometime in July will include the implementation of Oracle HR, and marketing and sales applications modules.

Streamlined processes

Using Oracle, all the systems were brought online. According to Brid, the implementation has drastically reduced the time to market, thereby enabling them to provide better service to their customers.

“Earlier, fairly straightforward processes such as bills and bookings were time consuming, but now everything is streamlined. However, these are short-term benefits that we observed as a result of the implementation of the first phase. Once, the second phase goes live, we expect even greater benefits,” elucidates Brid.

BI for increased customer satisfaction

Hathway is looking into Disaster Recovery. The company also plans to implement a data mining/warehousing solution. Considering the size of the company’s subscriber base, Hathway also plans to use Business Intelligence which, according to Brid would enable Hathway to better cater to their customers.

Ankush Sohoni