Power of UnITy

Godawari Power happens to be the flagship brand for the Hira Group of
industries. Not only is it publicly listed, it also lays claim to few of the
most sophisticated processes within the group.

Over the past four years, Godawari has undergone a huge shift both in their
IT processes as well as their perceptions. So much so, where there were only
legacy systems five years back, the company now has Rs 80 crore worth of IT
infrastructure alone. Since most of this infrastructure is on a shared basis
with the group companies, the figure doesnt stand for Godawari alone, though it
is the prime user and the IT parent of the group.

Says Anurag Choubey, GM, ITS who oversees IT for the Hira Group and more
specifically for Godawari, "Over the past four years, my vision was very
clearthat I want to build up shared infrastructure for the group." And this
vision seemed to have done a lot of good for the organization.

Under One Umbrella

Consolidation has been the mantra for Choubey since the last couple of
years. He has consolidated his network operations center in association with
Avaya for remote support to customers and security on a shared basis. He also
went in for a shared model for his bandwidth requirement, engaging two vendors.
Network consolidation has yielded tangible benefits. The maintenance revenue has
gone down approximately by 30% and handling and provisioning troubles have gone
down drastically. Security has also got a boost across the group organizations.

However, if there is one thing that distinguishes Godawari from the rest it
is the ERP implementation. Although it was done mostly for being SOX complaint,
it has come up with its host of benefits for Godawari. It has reduced the
billing cost by more than 30% for the company and has also thrown up enormous
amounts of data for them.

And well, to utilize this data effectively, Choubey is now planning to go for
a business intelligence solution. Although he looks for packaged solutions
wherever he can, he has also done some home-grown implementations in the past.
He is now also in the process of implementing supply chain management in his
organization. He thinks for any implementation three steps are crucial.
"Establish the process, match it to the people, and then match people to the
technology."

Implementation of unified communication is another project that Choubey feels
has been enormously cost effective for his organization. "Unified communication
has bought down 70% of our communication expenses," he says. Also, the
provisioning time has gone down by 90% after the introduction of unified
communication, the billing has become efficient and real-time call monitoring
has enabled a lot of control over the communication infrastructure for Choubey.

For the coming year, Choubey wants to try out the cloud model and shift his
DR to Airtel data center. He is also going for business intelligence in 2010.
And like a lot of other CIOs, his main challenges are not technologicalthey are
keeping pace with the changes happening in the field and then training his team
to adapt to these changes in a sustained manner.

Mehak Chawla

mehakc@cybermedia.co.in