Six Power Tips to Grow Your Business

At's one thing to hear clichéd statements like IT is essential for business success, and for enhancing productivity, or saving costs, increasing revenue, being more innovative, etc. But it has a totally different impact if you actually see them delivering results for companies. So, here I present the same clichéd statements, backed by some of the winners of this year's Best IT Implementation Awards.

1. To grow without adding manpower, you need tech to enhance the productivity of your existing workforce: This message comes loud and clear from the ERP deployment of a small manufacturing company called Essae Digitronics. The company more than doubled its turnover from 43 Cr to 85 Cr, without increasing manpower.

2. To maximize your profits, you need a robust workflow system that tracks everything end to end: You might have a great sales team that achieves all its revenue targets, but it loses impact if not backed by a strong back-end process for collections. That's the learning from the revenue management system deployed by Carzonrent for its car rental business. This mid-sized company managed to plug revenue leakages to the tune of Rs. 1.6 Cr per year by automating its cabs billing processes end-to-end, adding it straight to the company's bottomline!

3. Information must flow from the shop floor to the top floor to increase productivity: If you don't know the productivity and output of your production unit, you can't improve its output. A mid-sized company called Ace Designers realized this, and implemented a system that took data from all its CNC machines and sent it to a DSS. This helped top management see the production output of all machines, which improved productivity by 20%.

4. BI is no longer a luxury: Business apps like ERP and CRM are no longer sufficient. You also need BI to analyze data from these business apps, and take strategic decisions. SBI deployed BI across all its 13,800 branches in 32 counters, to gain better visibility into its system. The data was used to identify specific communities to target its various schemes. As a result, SBI could launch 70+ targeted marketing campaigns focusing on different communities.

5. You need a system that scales with your business: If your company is enjoying robust growth, then your IT systems should be able to support it. That's why Hero Honda upgraded its dealer management system so that it could not only handle the existing 40-50 lakh two-wheeler sales (and an equal number of services) per month, but also be ready for the future.

6. Innovative use of technology is a must: Everybody has access to technology, so you must use it differently to make a difference. Godrej Industries did just that by setting up a 3D website where the Indian youth could come in 3D avatars to play games, socialize, and participate in the company's various marketing campaigns.

To know more about what these companies, and several others did, read our cover story this time.