Titan Industries: Titanic Strides

Titan, with its wide range of watches and designer jewellery, is one of India's
greatest retail success stories. Besides having presence in over 40 countries,
Titan has more than 7000 outlets and 150 showrooms across India. Titan regards
IT as a tool and measures RoI in terms of business benefits obtained.

The balance scorecard model has resulted in improved value creation at Titan
and improved customer satisfaction levels for all its customers. Having
implemented SAP, Titan then went for a B2B solution to leverage Internet for
order handling, tracking and visibility. Subsequently, it went for MIS on
intranet followed by ERP implementation at its jewellery division, Tanishq, and
later launching an employee portal.

One of Titan's most prominent tech initiatives in recent times has been the
development of Web services for its partners, using .NET. .NET ensures that
Titan can incorporate functionality with XML web services when the need arises.
It also provides a seamless way to hook into heterogeneous applications and
databases without having to modify existing applications.

Titan initiated the project to web-enable the flow of information within the
Titan service network, between its offices, Carry Forward Agents (CFAs) and
retailers. Currently, the sales channel spans Titan's three manufacturing
units at Hosur, Dehradun and Ooty, the corporate office at Bangalore, four
regional offices and 32 CFAs across the country.

In the past around 73 of its service outlets ran a Customer Service
Information System (CSIS) that captured and recorded customer complaints and
tracked jobs to closure. The data from CSIS was periodically sent via floppy
disks to Titan Services and analyzed manually-an altogether cumbersome and
time-consuming process. Customer Service Centers (CSC) can now upload CSIS data
over the web, while centers that do not have CSIS send in reports in Excel
format. This information can be collated on various parameters and analyzed in
real time more easily and accurately than before. Reports from this analysis
flow to departments like manufacturing, finance, parts, and service- offering
feedback, alerts, information pertaining to manufacturing defects, sales
achievements, service quality, revenues etc.

From the management's perspective collecting field sales reports have also
become easy. Not only PDAs, Titan has gone the full futuristic push by going for
RFID technology. This new, and still esoteric, technology was pushed hard since
the jewellery business with 5000 varieties and with a high value of inventory
required RFID for tracking.