In order to be at par with global standards, Philips Electronics is revamping its IT infrastructure. In an interview with Biztech2.0, Sanjeev Kumar, Chief IT, Philips Lighting, South Asia, shares the company’s plans for the coming year and talks about how IT is changing the business efficiencies at Philips Electronics.
How has the deployment of MPLS helped Philips?
Initially, when we started connecting our distributors and retailers and tried to integrate various point-of-sale devices, we realised that we were using various modes of connectivity. We were using everything from RF to satellite to Microwave. As a move to simplify the entire set up, we have now connected all our offices through an MPLS solution. The MPLS cloud is a global cloud, which we call as the Philips Global Network. With this implementation, our governance, up time, SLA, maintenance and single point-of-contact efficiencies have improved and automation levels have also gone up. Now, we have a great network, reliable IT availability and a good response time.
You have deployed SOA for your ERP infrastructure. How is this helping Philips?
People have been talking a lot about SOA and its benefits for the last couple of years. We have many satellite applications running around ERP like e-ordering applications and workflow applications. It was essential to create an interface between applications running on the Internet and on our ERP at the back end. We evaluated the SOA of various vendors and finally selected Codice as it is met our requirements.
We have connected eight of our applications on the SOA platform. After the deployment, we have noticed tremendous improvements in operations. Earlier, it used to take 45 minutes to take orders; however, now the time has reduced to 30 seconds. The pressure on our sales team mounts as month end approaches and all of them get busy in taking orders to fulfill their set targets. That is when the new system really helps to ease off the pressure. Every minute saved can make a big difference in today’s competitive world.
How does Philips handle internal and external security threats?
Maintaining a secure environment within an organisation is a challenging job. In a broader perspective, security breach is occurring through social engineering like identity theft, credit card information theft and various other thefts that go beyond the boundaries of a CIO’s role.
We have in place various security solutions like identity management, firewall, sign on and authority management; however, we constantly try to evaluate the execution of various compliance standards. Today, about 80 percent of the workforce is using the Intranet while around 20 percent uses the Internet. This scenario will change within the next two years. Now a days, mobile executives and even customers are connected to the Internet rather than the Intranet. This increases security vulnerability on the user’s end.
The mantra for maintaining security is to make every employee of the organisation responsible for it. At Philips, we have focused on three important aspects:
• Make everyone responsible for IT security,
• Educate everyone about possible security loopholes, and
• Comply with various standards and audit constantly.
We are also running the Best-in-Class (BIC) IT programme to educate our employees.
What are the updates on Philips India moving to SAP to align with the global environment?
Globally, Philips is a huge company. Philips Lighting is deploying a lighting template worldwide. Lighting Template means deployment of SAP R3, Business Intelligence Warehouse for reporting, advanced planning and optimisation for Supply Chain and improvements in some parts of CRM. We have already prepared a complete roadmap for the deployment process and have set a target for the implementation with our global partner IBM for our South Asia operation.
We will probably go live with SAP by mid next year. Post deployment, we will be able maintain the global standards of Philips here in South Asia. The deployment will make us a part of the Global SAP Programme. We are also running GPM (Global Product Model) in order to ensure that one product is given one code globally and there is no repetition of the product code in any case.
What is the company’s plan as far as IT investment is concerned?
We have a target of spending Rs 30 crore on IT investments in India itself. We have signed agreements with HP and Microsoft for various projects. We wish to use the proprietary mailing system from Microsoft. Our three factories in South Asia will also go live on SAP by mid next year.