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Follow UsSTORAGE AND DR: Central Depositor Services Limited
Project Head: Pramod Deshpande, IT Head
Location: All India
CDSL (Central Depositor Services Limited) is a depository service promoted by BSE, SBI, Bank of Baroda and Bank of India. It handles demat accounts of investors in shares and securities. The company has grown six times in volumes, with the number of investor accounts having increased from 1 lakh to 6 lakh in just three years. With this kind of growth, their existing storage setup wasn't able to scale up to handle the load. So, the company decided to implement centralized storage. Plus, it already had a DR center at the Reliance Data center, which earlier acted as the backup site, but has now been made online.
So, if the primary system fails, the system at the DR center can take over within 30 minutes.
The primary setup consists of two EMC NAS devices for storage, Oracle for application server and Tuxedo as the middleware. The DR center has a similar setup.
Future plans include implementing an information-lifecycle management and business-continuity planning solutions.
The bottom line: Users can check and operate their demat account from the Net. This has reduced the cost of maintaining a demat account by one fourth.
SMART BUSUNESS MANGER: HCL Comnet
Project Head: J Kalyanaraman, VP, Business Transition and Knowledge Management
Location: 15 countries and 24 locations in India
HCL Comnet found that as it started to work 24 by 7, it needed information that was available transparently and in real time to authorized persons. For example, there was a need that Comnet's client abroad and the delivery team in India could update the status of a project anytime. Internally, the need was to build in accountability for internal service providers. This led to the Smart Business Manger project, a workflow-based automation process to monitor and update business activities in real time. These activities cover 10 applications, which include
ERP, finance, HR and sales. Each employee has a console on his desktop, using which he can access his own database in the company, the organization's database and the customers' databases. The access rules are determined by his role in the workflow. For example, he can request for a loan online and then track his request as it goes through HR and Accounts all the way up to when it gets sanctioned.
The bottom line: The project has fostered a transparent and knowledge-based culture by providing complete visibility to the employees in terms of query status and time taken to resolve the issue.
ICE: ONGC
Project Head: A Kaviraj,Executive Director, Corporate
Planning Location: All India
ICE (Information Consolidation for Efficiency) is touted as Asia's largest
ERP implementation project. It covers the strategic, tactical, and operational
requirements of ONGC, and covers more than 5,200 users. The objective of the
project has been to optimize and standardize the business processes at ONGC. It
facilitates decision support, better operation control and efficient cost
management. The project is helping ONGC obtain real-time information about the
state of its oil wells and pipeline network throughout the country. It's also
eliminating the duplication of activities across the business processes by
capturing data at source. The implementation has been rolled out in more than
100 operative locations across its Western offshore and onshore operations in
India. Around 22 SAP components have been installed. One is the SAP Remote
Logistics Management to support on time supply of materials to remote offshore
production locations. There's the Production Sharing Accounting module to
facilitate contractor cost calculation and cost-recovery tracking. Plus, there
are the MySAP Oil and Gas Upstream, Supplier Relationship Management, Product
Lifecycle Management and Strategic Enterprise Management modules.
The approximate cost of the project is Rs 95 crore.
The bottom line: Asia's largest ERP implementation covers the
strategic, tactical, and operational requirements of ONGC.
DIGITAL STUDIO: HP
Project Head: Ashwini Aggarwal, VP, Imaging and Printing Group, India
Location: All India
What's the most common type of photographs that Indians take? Wedding photographs followed by photos for identities. HP is cashing in on this segment by setting up HP digital studio franchisees all over the country. HP launched this project in 2002 and is already servicing customers in over 75 cities and 500 villages. And, to HP India's credit is the fact that the India project has been taken to China.
What is HP doing? It sells a computer, photo printer, scanner, digital camera and software to photo studio owners. In the photo trade, it is targeting existing photo studio owners, street photographers and niche photographers, while at the village level it is tying up with NGOs and e-governance projects. The benefit to the studio is that it is a low investment, high ROI business model. HP's pitch is: it takes $100 K upwards to set up a conventional digital lab, while HP's digital studio costs about $1K; and the high-end labs have a limited penetration, while an HP lab can be set up even at the village level. The studio owner will incur a hardware cost of about Rs 50,000. And, a set of four photos in Polaroid that cost a studio about Rs 38, will cost him only Rs 8-9 in the digital format. The falling prices of components will contribute towards taking the project to more studios.
The bottom line. The project is giving entrepreneurial advantage to photo-studio owners.
ONLINE COMMODITY TRADING: NCDEX
Project Head: Chandra Shekhar, Head IT
Location: All Indai
NCDEX (National Commodity and Derivates Exchange) was set up to introduce commodity trading in an organized manner. Today, it networks 112 centers through 400
VSATs, leased lines and VPNs, and connects about 500 members. The network helps in the discovery of realistic commodity prices to buyers and sellers in real time. The revenue for NCDEX is generated out of membership income, transaction fees and income from price dissemination. As the trading members are spread across the country, the type of connectivity they get varies depending upon the location. For example, members in metropolitan cities are linked through 64/128 kbps terrestrial links provided by either BSNL or
MTNL. Remote locations are connected through VSATs, which use the Ext-C Band. Some trading members, who're generating high volumes, have been given both connectivity options, where one acts as a fallback for another. Plus, there's a large number of trading members who trade from multiple locations (agricultural markets,
mandis, etc.). They've been given access through a secure VPN.
The project started in October 2003 and went live in just three months in December 2003. About a 100 trading members started trading from day one itself. The project cost was about Rs 15
crore, with the hardware and software being the major elements.
The bottom line: The Exchange does price discovery for several agricultural commodities and gathers spot market prices of these commodities from mandis across the country. The prices are dynamically polled on the trading system to enable legitimate future pricing. Farmers use these future quotes to reap a particular crop and sell it forward in the Exchange at a pre-determined price. This ensures better pricing of commodities on their physical delivery. The network also has linkages with markets across the globe.
CITIZEN SERVICES AND BPR: KDMC
Project Head: Dhanraj Khamatkar, Commissioner
Location: Kalyan and Dombivli, Maharashtra
The KDMC project was an IT and BPR initiative by the Municipal Corporation of Kalyan and Dombivli in
Maharashtra. Its face is the two CFCs (Citizen Facilitation Centers) in the two cities. These offer 93 services to the 12 lakh citizens, which range from issuing birth certificates to applying for shop licenses. Each CFC has 10 counters. All the eleven departments of the municipality have been computerized. This has also led to about 50 percent of its workforce becoming redundant. Already KDMC has dispensed the services of about 80 contract workers, while the permanent employees have been moved to other jobs.
The bottom line: The project has resulted in a 20 percent increase in revenue. And, the citizens now have a system that's transparent, time bound and accountable.