SR Balasubramanian- Behind Hero Honda's Dhoom

A very gentle disposition and an unpretentious ardor is the mark of this man,
who has been instrumental in scaling up Hero Honda to the scale of IT where it
stands today. This simple man has helped the largest two-wheeler company in the
world break new ground time and again, making a host of difference to the way
the automobile manufacturing world sees technology.

SR Balasubramanian's association with Hero Honda has been a long one. His
first stint, which lasted only 2 years, began in 1990 (see personal diary). This
was the time for the big turnaround from the legacy systems and for positive
changes in the employee perception towards IT. But his second stint demanded
more changes and improvements. "When I came back, I found that nothing much
had moved at Hero Honda since I left. What I had put in 1991 as state of art had
become outdated by 1998," he says.

In his first stint, he turned around the IT landscape, from one with legacy
systems and batch operations to one which used a sophisticated Ingres database
and SQL. "In the new system, the whole process was moved to the user, which
was a major cultural change for the organization," he recalls.

When he came back, he had a worn out and overloaded system to attend to. Even
the networks in the plants were in a bad shape, with frequent breakdowns.
"The first thing we did was revamp the entire set of cabling and getting
new severs, so that the existing setup worked well. This was done at the two
plants of Dharuhera and Gurgaon, the head office and over 18 marketing
offices," he says. While structured cabling became the nerves of the IT
system, Balasubramanian was looking at inadequacies, which hindered the
organizational setup from becoming numero uno.

SR Balasubramanian

A major event, a little later, was the ISO 14001 and 18001 certifications,
which brought about a large amount of automation and documentation. This was the
time he introduced the intranet, with all fixed documents like the HR policy
stored online for end-user ease. Employees could log in and see reports online,
instead of asking their departments. The verve with which Hero Honda employees
took to the new IT was a direct feedback of their confidence in his deployments
from his previous term.

In tune with the vision that the IT department has to be evolutionary, he
started developing a workflow. Those were the days when bandwidth was costly.
When e-mail and VSATs were first introduced the network usually got choked,
especially during Diwali, when employees sent each other power-point
presentations and cards. To rectify this situation, Hero Honda created a
depository of cards, which were replicated and mounted on the servers at
different locations. So, next time a person wanted to send a card, a link was
instead sent for the person at the other end to click and see the card from the
server.

When Balasubramanian rejoined Hero Honda in 1998, there were 3000 employees
and 35 people in the IT dept. Today Hero Honda has 4000 employees-but only 30
people in the IT department. He strongly believes that if IT is used optimally,
the need for manpower comes down. "IT department has now changed from
low-end people to middle-and high-end people, resulting in different quality
levels" he says.

In 1999, when ERP was not as common as it is today, he convinced the
skeptical management to opt for SAP. The SAP implementation started in June 2000
and took just eight months. This fast and quality implementation made Hero Honda
a global reference site for SAP as well as IBM.

After this success, Balasubramanian started looking at implementing new
packages. Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) were his next milestones, which he met in early 2004. At that
time, Hero Honda was designated as a ramp up site before version 3 was
commercially released. "Till date we are the only site in India to go live
on version 3. In three months we had deployed good quality SRM and CRM
implementations simultaneously."

Beyond SRM, he was also instrumental in getting SAP Business Intelligence
implemented sometime later. "We might not have done 10 different things,
but whatever we set out to do, we did it well," he says. "We also have
very little wastage. Our team is constantly evaluating the needs of the
enterprise and making sure that we implement only certain systems, which are
useful. There is a huge loss when something does not work and enterprises have
to revert to the old system, resulting in huge losses."

When asked how he keeps a team that works together and stays together, he
smilingly replies, "There have been instances when people have gone for
interviews and have been asked to work on SAP, with most implementations that
are of lower versions. Here they have already worked on the latest versions and
do not want to go back in technology."

Last year, Hero Honda declared its results on April 13, while Infosys
declared its the next day. On this achievement he says, "It is not about
setting records. It is the work that speaks for itself. Even thought accounting
in a manufacturing organization is more difficult than in a services
organization, we can boast of the fact that internal efficiency has reached a
stage where we can close our accounts faster."

IT is shining for Hero Honda and Balasubramanian promises that there are more
fireworks in store for 2005. For someone who could have been a successful CFO,
for all the formal education that he received, Balasubramanian followed his
heart and became the successful IT implementer that he is today.

Jasmine Kaur in New
Delhi

Personal Diary

Previous Assignments Joined IOC in 1976 as an accounts officer was and later
shifted to the MIS department, and then to the newly formed EDP dept. After 4.5
years at IOC, he spent 10 years at AFL management consultants, where he saw the
industry from the other side of the table. Worked at Hero Honda (1990-92) but
left because of the long distances to the Dharuhera plant. He then joined
Gujarat Heavy Chemicals and later GK Driveline before rejoining Hero Honda as GM
(Info Systems) in 1998.

Education Graduated with B.Sc (Chemistry) from Delhi University in 1970. A
researcher at heart, he was trained for Chartered Accountancy (CA) by his
father, who was himself a reputed accountant. Later had training in System
Analysis and Design and programming at IIT Mumbai, while at IOC. He also went on
to qualify as a Company Secretary (CS) in 1978.

Outside Hero Honda President of the Information Systems association, IS
India, since its inception in 1996. Headed a Lotus user group sometime back,
which subsequently got dissolved.

Family Married with two sons. His wife works for her family business in
publishing books for government offices. Both sons are pursuing engineering from
Tamil Nadu.

Hobbies Likes listening to light classical music, and playing cricket and
lawn tennis

Achievements/Claim to fame

• Went live with ERP in February 2001. It was hailed as the fastest
  implementation in an organization of this size. Got SAP's Star Site award
  for 2001 and is till date a global reference site for SAP as well as IBM.
• Implemented Enterprise Storage Servers in 2003-Hero Honda is the largest
  storage site for IBM.
• Implemented SRM and CRM, simultaneously, in a matter of just three months.
• Today, Hero Honda is a global reference site for SAP SRM and SAP R3 ERP.
  By July 2004, SAP's Business Intelligence was also implemented.
• Extended to connectivity partners and made them extended organizations.

Plans for 2005

• Wants to consolidate the supply chain, connecting all the dealers and
  vendors; 48 of its 125 vendors and 50 of the 550 dealers already connected.
• Planning to implement the payment gateway, which would cover the banks so
  that once the bill is passed, payments can be transferred automatically.
• Intends to move to the next level of enterprise storage: Storage
  Virtualization.
• Ready with plans to implement information Lifecycle Mgmt and to outsource
  disaster recovery management