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"Clients are not fools, they understand"

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DQI Bureau
New Update

l How has the

merger been so far? How different are PwC and IBM as organizations and how much

has the difference in cultures mattered?



There are more similarities than differences. There is a strong commonality

in the culture of the two organizations. Both PwC and IBM are client-focussed

organizations and collaboration and teaming are core areas for both. Also, both

IBM and PwC have a culture of respect for the individual. Knowledge management

and self-development of our people are central to both organizations. We have so

many things in common that the integration has been very smooth. Of course there

are differences in the way we operate and that’s because of the fact that we

are different companies. IBM is very large in several areas while we have areas

like audit and tax, which are totally different from the kind of consulting IBM

offers. For people from PwC, the change has been to try and understand the

largeness of IBM, and how to fit into the matrix of the organization.

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Anjan

Mukerji,
country leader, IBM (business consultancy services)

l When is the

integration likely to be complete?



In the key area of clients and services, we have already merged. We now have

a single face for the client. Some business process issues like how we do

billing, which year we do it etc have to be ironed out. But these are issues

with any large merger and they will iron themselves out. We may not have one

financial system or one way to claim expenses today but we will have it shortly.

The credit to IBM is that they kept the whole group together instead of breaking

it up. If that had happened, there would have been other issues to sort out.

Instead, they have formed a whole group called Business Consulting Services and

employees of PwC have been put under this group.

l What are the

respective strengths that PwC and IBM bring to the table in India?



What PwC really brings in, is our leadership position in certain areas like

enterprise resource planning including SAP, Peoplesoft, and Oracle. PwC is in a

dominant position globally as well as in India in the ERP space. We have a

leadership position in the supply chain, generally speaking. And it’s just not

just on ERP products. That’s just a part of the supply chain. Globally PWC are

leaders in the CRM space. We bring depth of industry knowledge in areas we

operate in like industrial finance, financial services, communication, and

distribution. And we also bring in deep client relationships with large clients

in these industries.

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IBM brings in the deep resources of IBM Global Finance, and the strength of

IBM’s software and hardware brands. By combining IBM and PwC, what we have

created is a company that can provide end-to-end solutions from the strategy end

right through to business process transformation, ERP and IT (technology

implementation) to outsourcing. We also happen to be the master of the vertical

spaces. That’s something nobody in the industry can do. What it does for IBM

is change the game globally. We’ll provide unparalleled service and value

proposition to clients. We will transform a services company to a solutions

company. And we won’t be just selling products to provide solutions. While our

competitors will have three or four companies joining together to form an

alliance to provide a complex solution, we can do it all in-house.

l Would there

be pressure to always recommend an IBM product?



There’s no shame in recommending something we believe is good. Clients are

not fools, they understand. We will recommend IBM products where we think they

are good but we have the mandate and independence to recommend anything else.

The days of the typically independent consultant are over and it’s the age of

collaboration today. You cannot provide solutions to complex problems of clients

from formulation to implementation without really having a wide footprint.

l What are the

industry verticals you are looking at? And why?



We concentrate on a couple of basic industry verticals. The first one is

called industrial which includes all products that corporates buy. It could

include computers, oil and gas or even boilers. Our focus on this group is

supply chain management.

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These companies thrive by having an efficient supply chain. ERPs have been a

very important component of the implementation of the supply chain. Several

large companies in India have implemented ERPs and have got benefits in terms of

integrating disparate processes and different components of the value chain.

The next vertical we are looking at is the distribution sector. Here too our

focus is on the supply chain. This vertical includes consumer and packaged good

(CPG) companies making food products or other kinds of products. It also

includes retail, life sciences and the pharma sector. Our focus is on the CPG

and pharma life sciences though we also see retail taking off in India. CRM is

exceedingly important for life sciences and retail. Point of sale is important

for the retail group and sales force automation is crucial for all CPG and

pharma companies. Interestingly, for the pharma companies, drug discovery and

clinical trials have become areas where the use of technology is increasing. The

data churned out during these trials is huge. Sifting through the data and

getting information and knowledge is not an easy task. Today, the technology

components are in place to do that and pharma companies are waking up to it. In

the communication sector, we are focussing on telecom, utility companies, media

and entertainment. For telecom companies, CRM is exceedingly important. And it’s

just not about call centers only. With a churn taking place in this sector in

India, billing and customer care are crucial and that’s an important area for

us.

The next important sector for us is financial services. The type of services

we provide in this sector depends on the nature of the institution. Government

owned banks are still trying to implement core banking into the thousands of

branches across the country. Having centralized systems, having flexibility to

expand to more branches are areas they are still coping with. They are usually

overweight and can derive a lot of benefit by streamlining processes, cutting

out duplication, and removing redundant processes. The new generation Indian

banks already have core-banking solutions and are exploring business process

outsourcing and doing away with the non-core activities by giving them away to

service providers. They are also looking at taking the transaction data from the

customers and getting knowledge out of it in terms of profitability by customer

groups and product groups.

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l Are there

likely to be redundancies ?



We’ve come together not to make people redundant but to grow the business.

We’re not looking at the negatives now; we are looking at growing the market.

l What are

your future targets?



I do not want to make any predictions but I would say that we are very

bullish on India.

TV Mahalingam

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