 "Suzlon Energy's Knowledge Management Portal Energises Employees")
IT is not just an enabler for a business to increase revenue but can also be an indirect tool to increase internal collaboration between employees. Suzlon Energy’s knowledge management portal, which went live on 27th March 2007 focuses on sharing information and making connections among the employees.
A global manufacturer of wind turbines, having operations in over 11 countries and 236 locations, Suzlon registered a 108% increase in sales in the last financial year. This gave rise to the need of managing data and also the knowledge generated. According to Dr. V.V.Rao, group head, IT, Suzlon Energy, the logic is really simple. “We have operations in various countries, and a problem solved in one country can help a power plant in another. A knowledge management portal exclusively for employees is a platform where people can interact with information and with each other."
Powering the portal
After identifying the need to set up a knowledge management portal, it was decided that it would be based on the requirements of the users. Dr. Rao emphasised, “This initiative is not just a corporate tick mark. We were clear that the people who would use the portal would participate right from the initial stages.”
The team went through 5 stages before the launch. 49 workshops were conducted and about 1800 requirements were registered. The next step was creating a proof of concept (POC), where a real time version of the portal was demonstrated to the users. It was only after this that they started the development and rolled out the final demo portal in 4.5 months, with Enteg as the implementation partner.
They developed it on an AX hardware platform, with Unix as the OS. SAP Netweaver and Oracle database systems were used for content management. Being an intranet-based system, networking platforms like FDMA and MPLS were used. “We did look at some .NET based portal technologies but they didn’t match our criteria of functionality, bandwidth utilisation, licensing and cost of ownership. SAP was chosen as a portal environment as it was easier to integrate with their existing system, ECC 6.0 and faster to implement.”
To manage the knowledge generated, there’s a team of knowledge managers who go through the information, edit it and send it to the technical team who then design and publish it. Authorisation is needed to access different layers of information, making the right information visible to the right people; based on their ranks and roles. Also, the shelf life of the information is longer as it remains on the portal as opposed to an e-mail, which can be accidentally deleted.
Such a large pool of knowledge needs top-notch security and Dr Rao confidently confirms, “We have 4 layers of security including 3 internal layers and 1 layer from SAP.”
Generating positive energy
The most important change that has come about, according to Dr. Rao is the collaboration between employees through forums and feedback. This was a move by the management to give employees a platform for converting implicit knowledge and the user response demonstrates its success. The portal had gathered 67,524 hits in 2 months and the count now stands at approximately 94,000 hits.
However, training all the users still remains a challenge. There were about 3000 expected users out of which more than 2000 have been trained so far. “Since we’re spread over different locations, reaching all the people is tough. It is also a comprehensive portal, so it takes about 2 days of training.”
That being a significant time away from productive work, how would they justify it in terms of ROI? To this, Dr Rao replies, “We have a 6 month period before calculating the efficiency of the system, but the way it is going, I can say it’s already 100% (ROI).”
In future, they intend to roll out other layers where users will be able to extract information from vendors, customers, and other associates.
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