Havells India Group CIO Sachin Gupta feels that irrespective of the technology deployed, it needs to solve business problems, help reduce costs and generate more business
SACHIN GUPTA
HAVELLS INDIA
We have an app called m-Konnect, one for employees and the other for our dealers/ distributors. We have a catalogue called m-Catalogue which has got Augmented Reality feature, you can take the app, click the picture of the room and put the image of the fan and see how would it look like in the room.
Digital transformation is a wide world and Havells India Senior VP and Group CIO Sachin Gupta would rather not label everything as digital transformation for the term may be confusing or misleading. The Group is working on every aspect of digital transformation including Mobility, Cloud, Automation and even Social. Each of these projects is helping the company revamp its processes with the help of latest technology.
Take for example, the recent project undertaken by Gupta on the manufacturing and supply-chain side. “We have undertaken a project called product tracking and automation where we track and serialise the products,” says Gupta, adding, “In certain cases, the product comes in a single pack, goes into a bigger one and then the wholesale box. Therefore, we marry all those stages. For example, a retail pack could have 10 individual boxes and a bigger pack multiple retail boxes. We track it all the way, from manufacturing to warehouse, warehouse to dealer/ distributor and dealer to retailer,” explains Gupta.
Havells has created an app where anyone can track the product, scan the serial number and get to know its present location. On the mobility front, Gupta has undertaken a document management system including product tracking and automation.
As far as Cloud is concerned, Havells uses both, Microsoft Azure and AWS. The company is following the Cloud First strategy wherein all the applications are built in the Cloud and then depending on what the application is, who the users of the application are and what does it mean to interact with, it is decided whether to leave it on the Cloud or bring it on the premises.
Despite the sizeable number of transformational projects Gupta is undertaking, he says he rarely talks about technology to the directors or the business. “I want to understand about the business problems, then come back and sit down with the IT team to find out the solutions,” Gupta opines.
The days where it could take six months to come up with a solution to the business are long gone, shares Gupta. Today, more and more CIOs are turning into CTOs and are starting to think digital and how they are going to start working with businesses than taking technology aspects into consideration, he feels.
“When we sit down and look at the requirements related to the businesses, we find solutions to increase revenues and cut costs. For example, if we analyse the projects we have done in the last one year, be it is digitisation distributor management system, product tracking, sales force automation or e-commerce or IoT platforms, we find out their feasibility, how they provide cost savings in terms of either building efficiency or increasing revenues in terms of giving us visibility to opportunity. We have created a retailer app which we are going to launch on Hana as also dashboards where we are working both, on predictive analysis and on reporting which we are starting to use which again brings efficiency and visibility. Everything revolves either around cost savings or increase in revenues,” explains Gupta.
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