How has IT helped Hutchison Essar to cope with this pressure?
There has been a three-fold impact of the recent telecom upheavals on our IT
systems. Firstly, Hutch has witnessed a substantial growth, both organic and
inorganic, that has led to a tremendous jump in number of subscribers.
Subsequently, this has created acute pressure on our infrastructure and our
challenge was to manage the infrastructure accordingly when the scale-up takes
place.
The second challenge was to provide the right infrastructure appropriate to
provide customer services. With so many competitors both in the GSM as well as
CDMA fold, there is a requirement to integrate your CRM with billing systems
besides widespread usage of applications like churn management and fraud
management.
Lastly, regulatory changes have drastically altered the business scenario,
which in turn had an impact on the usage/adoption of IT. For example,
introduction of WLL or the interconnect regime forced us to suddenly make
necessary changes in our IT systems at an absolutely priority basis.
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Which instances would you count as successful examples of IT
implementation in Hutchison Essar?
IT has played a crucial role in the billing systems where for certain data
services like GPRS we have opted for usage-based charging instead of
subscription based charges. The most important decision after Hutch acquired the
Delhi circle was to change the existing billing system, and gradually migrate it
towards a standard billing system working across all Hutch circles. With more
and more mobile applications coming in, IT has an impact on our mediation device
for all CDRs. Currently we are using mediation software from Wipro, but we are
looking at an alternative from abroad. For BSS, our preferred vendor is Sema
from Atos Origin. Lastly, with more switches being set up, we have changed the
interface between IT and switches to TCP/IP from X.25. This has led to an
increase in transmission speed by more than 4-5 times. Though, we had y-o-y
budgetary allocations of about Rs 150 crore, we have not been able to utilize
them fully in the last two years.
What is the future role of IT for Hutchison Essar?
The main role of IT would be to enable us to provide the right kind of
information to our customers and to support the necessary level of
infrastructure, especially at the call center level. With the thrust so heavily
focused on call centers, we have plans to standardize the call center
infrastructure like IVRs and ACDs, and also to enhance the Web presence to
bolster our call center support. In addition, with a number of new circles
coming to our fold, 2004 would see a large-scale implementation of CRM, with
Oracle CRM already partly up in Mumbai and a few other circles.