Tata Teleservices: Managing Dynamism in Telecom Business

Tata Teleservices is one of the leading telecommunications
service providers of India offering mobile, fixed line, broadband and corporate
communications services across the country. Among the first private telecom
company to start operations in the country after deregulation, Tata Teleservices
operates in 20 circles. Having pioneered the CDMA 3G1x technology platform in
India, Tata Teleservices has established a robust and reliable telecom
infrastructure that ensures quality in its services. IT is today the market
leader in the fixed wireless telephony market with a total customer base of over
3.8 million.

Tata Teleservices (TTSL) is in a very dynamic market environment
that is currently witnessing rapid changes in customer behaviour in a very
competitive market. "As a service provider, our key challenges include the
spiralling down of the telecom tariffs thereby benefiting the end consumer with
an extremely huge challenge of managing and effectively bringing down
costs," says Navin Chadha, CIO, Tata Teleservices. He also adds that in
addition to that customer retention by providing timely and effective service
has been a key challenge. "TTSL aims to achieve its numbers and grow by
targeting specific customer niches through its Strategic Business Units and
focus on both numbers and revenues through the same," Chadha observes.

In such a business environment TTSL needed a strong robust
application which would cater to circle/State specific requirements and
parallelly offer ease of consolidation at the corporate level. "We also
wanted high degree of controls — with low or minimized risk of users
performing/corrupting data during various points of data entry. Moreover, there
was also a need for a complete monitoring and control system of the spend plan
— for the large amounts of Capex investments planned during the roll out of
the new circles to ensure adherence to budgets," points out Chadha. The
operator also wanted an end to end tracking of inventory for both Capex and Opex
items and manage the same effectively, accounting and tracking of fixed assets,
automated updation and little or no need to run programs to run updates for
consolidated and updated reports/balances, and accounting and management of
payables and receivables.

In order to meet the abovementioned challenges, TTSL implemented
mySAP ERP (Version: Enterprise Edition 4.7). 12 TTSL circles have gone live
directly on SAP.

According to Chadha, SAP at TTSL today delivers Capex monitoring
by ensuring procurements do not exceed the budgeted Capex, Opex monitoring by
delivering reporting on budget vs. actual, inventory monitoring of products on a
pan India basis, proper accounting and tracking of fixed assets, tracking of
cell site wise expenditure via Real Estate Management, tracking key customer
equipment serial number wise, reporting on key parameters. "Usage of SAP is
spread across all locations and at all levels — including third party service
providers — performing data entry — thereby defining the base on which
management reporting can be drawn," informs Chadha.

According to Chadha, SAP's strengths in being an integrated
enterprise solution vendor helped finalizing the vendor. "TTSL had SAP
earlier and it was a case of getting back to SAP as the functionalities from its
competition did not meet our requirements," he points out. Stating that
TTSL's overall experience with SAP has been good, Chadha observes that some of
the areas of improvement include management of high volumes of serial number
based Customer Premises Equipment Management and interface of applications like
Intec with SAP and automated Invoicing in SAP. Chadha also feels that SAP can do
better by including support for Indian Tax related issues.

Team DQ

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in