SPECIAL MENTIONS

e-HRD Model Govt of Assam

Project Head: Dr Prem Saran, IAS, Commissioner, Hill Areas Dept, Govt of Assam 

Location: Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills of Assam

The objective of this project has been to improve the human resource potential of the government employees in the insurgency affected hill districts of Assam. Essentially, the model itself has nothing to do with IT. It's a simplified version of a traditional technique of meditation and visualization, used to tap the potential. This technique was developed by the project head, Dr Prem Saran, and a 20-minutes video of the same was created. IT was used as the medium to reach the employees, and NIC's (National Informatics Center) infrastructure was used for the job. A high-end server was set up, with VSAT connectivity to a NIC server. 

At the district level, NIC's gateways with VSAT connectivity to the state level server. The districts are further connected to various district offices over OC links. The offices themselves already have computer networks in place. The video is streamed to the computers over the Internet. Training staff has been put in place to train the government officials. The cost of putting up this project is very low, as it's using NIC's existing IT infrastructure for the job. However, the benefits of the same are plenty.

Life in an area, which is insurgency-hit isn't simple. So besides protection, the government employees also need motivation to work. This model will help officials measure up to their potential, make them more productive and help them with delivery of services to customers.

Hospital Information System Fortis Healthcare 

Project Head: Sunil Kapoor, Head-IT 

Location: Mohali, Chandigarh, Amritsar, Punjab

The beauty of the homegrown HIS or Hospital Information System at Fortis is in the way it's been integrated with other systems of the hospital and the level of information it processes. The system goes beyond the standard HIS functionalities of patient admission/discharge, physician order entry system and ward/OPD management. These are anyways a part of the system, but along with that the system also integrates with the PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) and labs-management systems, patient satisfaction measurement and analysis system, patient's refunds tracking system, and many others. Plus, it has made the single window clearing system a reality, which allows registration, administration, discharge and transfers for both OPD and in-patients departments all from a single counter. The system can also do remote monitoring of the patient-bedside monitors, which is useful when specialists sitting in the Mohali hospital want to monitor a patient in Fortis' hospital in Amritsar. This hub and spoke model can be implemented across multiple locations, and Fortis plans to implement this right down to the general physician level. 

Moreover, an enterprise wide Web-based MIS has also been implemented, which provides detailed information about various parameters that are critical for strategic decision-making. The entire HIS has been developed using a database at the back end with a VB front end and Web tools. Besides these, a SAN has been implemented for storing data, and various medical equipment also interface with the HIS, such as those at the radiology labs and X-Rays. Currently, besides the features we mentioned, the HIS also includes diagnostic reporting, materials management, and even smart cards implementation for the employees for attendance, access control and even dispensing food in the cafeteria.

Platform Migration HDFC Bank

Project Head: Surya Prasad, Vice President 

Location: Mumbai covering 215 branches across India

As businesses continue to grow, the pressures on the IT infrastructure that supports the business grows too. An answer to handle this additional load is to scale up the infrastructure. However, technology obsolescence and inflexible systems restrict scaling up. HDFC Bank faced a similar problem, it required additional infrastructure support that could optimize performance and also future proofs their investment. But, their existing Alpha server infrastructure could not offer the kind of flexibility, performance and manageability, which would serve their growing needs. Also, a solution was required that could handle peak
time workloads. HDFC decided to shift the system platform from Alpha to Power5. The reasons for this were better performance, virtualization, which allows dynamic partitioning of the system resources, and on-demand feature, which provides a way for handling peak loads. 

The systems decided were two IBM P570s each having 12 Power 5 CPUs and 50GB RAM, and configured in failover cluster mode. Of the twelve CPUs, ten are used for normal operation, and the remaining two are standby, which are utilized as and when the load starts peaking. Apart from the main systems, an eight CPU system is used at the disaster recovery site.The project started in August' 04 and took nine months for completion, including migration of Oracle data, and FlexCube and CashIn applications, which are used for corporate banking and for cash management respectively.

Harmony Infosys Technologies

Project Head: Shailesh Kumar Agrawal, Group Project Manager 

Location: Across the globe

Managing human resource is the biggest challenge faced by IT companies today. Employers find ways and means to reach out to the employees better and provide them with necessary information. 

In such cases, an employee relationship management system is the needed. Infosys technologies embarked on this project, which would be an HR and Money (read finance) system for its employees. In fact, the project name 'Harmony' does not mean harmony comes from HR plus money.

The system is meant to be one place for Infosys' employees for all kind of structured and unstructured data. It has modules for storing personal and official data, such as bank account details, PAN, emergency contacts, electronic forms of documents such as degrees, mark sheets and passports; tools for managing personal finance, income tax, provident fund, esop, and more.

The system also displays company policies and related information. 

Developed using ASP.NET and SQL Server2000, it is globally accessible by all employees. Infosys was the first Indian company to e-apply for NSSN (National Social Security Number) 

This also facilitated Infosys' Tsunami relief contribution program. Several other modules like loans, employee assessment are under way to be included in the system.

Data Warehousing, J K Industries Limited

Project Head: S S Sharma , GM (IT) 

Location: HO-Delhi & Regional Offices

As the name suggests, this is a data-warehousing project, implemented for analyzing data on warranties and claims from different sales regions of J K Industries. The company has more than 100 sales offices, doing invoicing, collection, warranty claim, etc. Before this, a heterogeneous platform was used for the job, leading to duplicity in data. 

This system centralized all the data and the data redundancy was reduced by an astounding 75%. It also helped the sales force become more productive, as they could now analyze the data easily and make more informed decisions using the past data. 

Their initial project used MS SQL Server 2000, in which they found some desirable features missing. To overcome this problem, they switched to Oracle 9i/AS midway. Using this arrangement, the data at the warehouse level is captured into a Visual FoxPro database, which is then filtered and moved into the new Oracle system. Also, in doing all this, they ended up with the ability to Web-enable their entire data and increase the accuracy of information by eliminating what was redundant.

They were also able to utilize their Oracle experience in other areas, streamlining a lot of systems in the process.

Programmer-independent reporting and MIS systems added by this project help their executives query, drill-down, roll-up the information (using OLAP cubes) and assess lag and lead functions. 

The original system was mainly to reduce the time required to process warranty and claims applications of JK's tyres division. The application helped them reduce this from 30 to 3 days per month, which is a commendable leap. 

Sankraman, Mahindra & Mahindra

Project Head: Krishna H Nabar, Head — Business Solutions, Corporate IT 

Location: Mumbai (Data Center) catering to around 50 locations across the country

One of the first industries in India to go for large-scale computerization was the manufacturing industry. Companies, such as Hero Honda and Maruti had gone through complex ERP implementations much before such terms even became industry buzzwords. Mahindra & Mahindra, an automobile manufacturer, also implemented SAP R/3 way back in 1997. The communications infrastructure, being poor in India at that time, forced Mahindra & Mahindra to go for a distributed implementation with SAP servers spread across eight locations all across the country. The distributed architecture brought its set of problems along; maintenance costs were high, data consolidation was cumbersome and time consuming.

Now, with the much improved communication infrastructure, and bandwidth prices having been slashed significantly, a solution to the above problems lied in a central SAP implementation which will cater to all Mahindra & Mahindra locations. Mahindra & Mahindra decided to do a fresh implementation of SAP R/3 4.7 on a single server (8 CPU, IBM P570 in a fail over cluster configuration with another 4 CPU IBM server) and then to merge data from all SAP R/3 4.6B servers into that server. As simple as it may sound, data migration from multiple servers is a complex task. It requires data collation, which should then be examined to remove redundancy and duplicity. After this, a single meaningful data instance should be created for the central server.

The implementation, which also includes a disaster recovery site, was spread across a time frame of nine months, starting from July 2004. The expected life of the implementation is five years. The implementation, while reducing administrative tasks, also brings direct business benefits by providing better performance and features than the previous implementation.