Torrent Pharmaceuticals: In Leaps and Torrents

When Jyoti Bandhopadhyay took charge at Torrent Pharmaceuticals
as a CIO, his reputation preceded him. He was an industry veteran with years of
experience at majors like Pfizer. The company based out of Ahmedabad had a
distributed system, thus all the data was sent to the HO periodically. Much of
the system was manual and prone to all the flaws that are quite common
elsewhere.

Bandhopadhyay had a mandate for change and he set about putting
proper systems and processes at place. First, he setting up a world class data
center in Ahmedabad equipped with the latest IT infrastructure like IBM and HP
servers. Once that was in place he set about connecting the 50+ offices in India
and the offices abroad through the best possible means, be it VSAT, VPN or even
radio frequency. Next, the company went in for SAP ERP. "After much
diligence, we found it to be the best suited to our needs and it provided us
with all tools, and it could also be scaled up in the future depending on the
company's need," says the proud CIO.

"After much diligence, we found it (SAP ERP) to be the best suited to our needs and it provided us with all the tools; it could also be scaled up in the future depending on the company's need" -Jyoti Bandhopadhyay, CIO, Torrent Pharmaceuticals

But the biggest challenge for Bandhopadhyay was yet to come.
With all the systems in place, he came across a peculiar problem. Connecting his
sales force on a single platform. The options available were either too
rudimentary or too expensive. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,
Bandhopadhyay chose quite an unlikely option: he chose neither. He decided to
build the solution himself.

After the board was convinced, Bandhopadhyay hired a team of IT
professionals from the market and set about building the sales force package
himself. In close to 3-4 months, the pilot was up and running. And after
de-bugging, the first beta was rolled out locally in January 2004. By April
2005, the solution was rolled out in Mumbai and in December of the same year,
added another feature based on HR feedback to the solution.

Even the name for the solution was arrived at in a novel way.
"We had an employee contest, and among all the names suggested, Torrentian
was the one that was chosen. The employee who suggested the name got a
laptop," says a gleaming Bandhopadhyay. Now over 2,500 field agents use
Torrentian regularly to check the stock and supply of the products and also for
any professional news. The system is accessed from the Internet.

Bandhopadhyay's work is still not over. He is currently
working on a language version of Torrentian that would be rolled out in Germany
shortly. "We had embarked on an IT roadmap a few years ago, I am happy that
we have progressed thus far. But the journey is never over. In this job I am
learning something new everyday, and have been doing so for many years. This is
the fun of being a CIO in the pharmaceutical industry," says Bandhopadhyay.

Shashwat Chaturvedi

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in