ENTERPRISE 2004 ROUND UP: Connectivity is Priority for SRL

SRL Ranbaxy, a clinical reference laboratory which specializes in diagnosis
and testing, operates out of a central laboratory in Mumbai and has seven
satellite labs all over India, servicing more than 335 cities.

The company runs lab operations at various nationwide locations. These labs
are in locations like Bangalore, New Delhi, Mohali, Faridabad, Kolkata,
Hyderabad and Amritsar. These locations are currently not linked and the company
plans to connect them in future through VSAT. The first phase of connectivity
has been planned and will be completed before March 2004. This includes
connecting Mumbai with Delhi and Bangalore. In the second phase, the
connectivity in the rest of the areas will be completed in the first quarter of
next fiscal.

It is also in the process of creating a central data center in Mumbai,
connecting the existing nine labs as well as all the upcoming labs to enable the
customers to have a single point of interaction. The company claims that it will
be the largest lab medicine service chain after the implementation.

SRL has accumulated a large amount of scientific data. So to arrange it
logically, the company plans to have a data warehouse which will help it to do
the data mining for various research purposes like epidemic study, disease
patterns etc. The company already has ERP in place, developed in-house as per
CMM level 5 process.

The company then decided to do the backward integration by having
connectivity with collection centers for which they developed the ‘CCNet’
and forward integration by connecting sales team and doctors by having a
web-based internet portal called ‘Ccom’.

G Radhakrishna Pillai,Head-IT, SRL Ranbaxy Ltd said, " Currently out of
500 collection centers, 125 collection centers are using CCNet by which they can
directly place the order for laboratory testing."

"This has reduced the manual cumbersome processes," he added.