CSI Awards for Excellence in IT 2013

This year it was Visakhapatanam that played host to Computer Society of India's CSI Awards for Excellence in IT 2013. Popularly known as Vizag, the city witnessed a number of activities during the three day conference. Participants from the IT industry and customers who implemented innovative technologies in their organizations welcomed the outcomes of the awards.

CSI 2013 awards saw overwhelming participation from all sectors of the corporate world. Some of the contestants from 2013 were: State Bank Of India, Union Bank Of India, Mahindra And Mahindra Financial Services Ltd. Punjab National Bank, YES Bank Ltd. Bharat Petroleum, Sears It And Management Services India Pvt Ltd. BHEL, Kensoft, Datamatics, SchneiderElectric SAS, WeP Solutions Ltd., Tata Moters, Tech Mahindra, RINL, Ammachi Labs, e Herex Technologies, DTDC, Meru, Reliance Infrastructure, SIFY Technologies, IBM, SITA, AMRITA VishawaVidyapeeth, Marathi Vishwakosh, SAS Institute, etc.

The following categories of excellence were identified for the participation during this year: Business Collaboration Solutions: Banking & Finance, Design & Engineering Solutions: Product Manufacturing, Healthcare: Infrastructure & Solutions, IT Infrastructure & Equipment Solutions, Advance Analytics: Products, Designs & Solutions, Education & eLearning: Products & Solutions and Transport-Air, Rail, & Road: Products, Designs & Solutions.

The following criterions were identified by the jury members for the selection process: Criticality of IT Usage, process re-engineering, improvement of customer service, innovation, return on investment, quality of management, impact: Organizations/Society/Green IT / CSR.

Here is a list of winning projects in their respective categories:

Online Integrated Employee-centric Services Portal: In the ‘Business Collaboration Solutions category: Banking & Finance', Bharat Heavey Electricals, Bhopal won the first prize for their Online Integrated Employee-centric Services portal. Developed inhouse, it is a portal for all the sections of the employees, covering a number of discrete applications and integrating the data outputs of a number of different data bases to arrive at a comprehensive platform for information sharing.

Online Common Suggestion Portal: Tata Motors, Pune, emerged as winner in the ‘Design & Engineering Solutions: Product Manufacturing' category. Online suggestion system is a common portal for Tata Motors used for managing and maintaining suggestions given by the employees across Tata Motors. Earlier there were different approaches being used by all locations. This common system has helped in integrating requirements of all locations and management. This is an online portal for complete process of suggestion entry to suggestion closure.

Currently, the portal is running across many plants with a total of around 7 lakh suggestions received from April 2012.

Boiler Pressure Parts Erectability Monitoring System: Developed by Bharat Petroleum Corporation, Boiler Pressure Parts Erectability Monitoring System clinched the first award in the ‘Advance Analytics: Products, Designs & Solutions' category. BHEL's Trichy Complex is one of the leading boiler manufacturers in the world and India's largest engineering and manufacturing enterprise. One of the major challenges faced by the company today is non-sequential despatch of boiler components to project site which result in poor erectability thereby, hampering project execution. On-site storage of despatched equipment prior to erection is problematic due to non-availability of storage space. The system calculates erectability index which is a strategic measure of project completion. Also consolidated MIR helps in effective decision making for the management.

Online Labs for School Experiments (Olabs) for Rural Schools: In ‘Education & eLearning: Products & Solutions,' Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham scored the highest for its Online Labs for School Experiments (Olabs) project. OLabs reached a significant milestone in February 2013, when it was officially endorsed by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to all its affiliated schools. Olabs have the advantage of helping teachers provide individual intervention despite large class sizes by using the individual student reports generated. The OLabs is jointly developed by Amrita University and CDAC, Mumbai under a research grant from the Department of Electronics and Information Technology. There is an evaluation component which tests the students' understanding of the lab and related theory. Olabs are available on Aakash tablets for wider use and in local language like Hindi, Malayalam, and Marathi. At present, over 45 physics, chemistry, biology experiments are available online.

Project Amrut: Meru Cab emerged winner with its Project Amrut in the ‘Transport' category. Under this project, the company successfully optimized trips per cab per day which helped it improve the driver's earning and so company's revenues. The project went live in different phases between Sep'12 and Feb'13. The system works on an algorithm to automatically assign a cab to the customer based on criteria like distance from pick up location, fair distribution of business, etc.

IBM SmartCloud Virtual Server Recovery (VSR): IBM India was winner in the ‘IT Infrastructure & Equipment Solutions (Merged with) Healthcare' category for its SmartCloud Virtual Server Recovery system. It enables to leverage Virtual machines (VM) running on cloud infrastructure to recover functions of selected servers. This system helps continuously replicate server images and data to VSR site improving recovery time dramatically to less than an hour and, in many cases, to a few minutes. It replicates information on primary resources-CPU/RAM so that it allocates same resources automatically at VSR site during invocation. Currently, it supports both Windows and Linux.