When Titan Went Through a Black Hole Period

At an event organized by Enterprise Connect in Bangalore recently, Bhaskar
Bhat, CEO of Titan Industries, was invited to address CIOs to highlight a CEO’s
perspective of business and how a CEO perceived the role of IT in the larger
context of achieving corporate goals. Enterprise Connect, an exclusive program
for the community of enterprise CIOs created by Cyber India Online Limited (CIOL),
is a platform to enable CIOs share and exchange information with peers and
interact with the IT industry.

In his talk, Bhat spoke about Titan’s vision and mission the challenges it
faces in order to establish itself as the country’s most desirable brand in
watches and jewelry, and how IT has helped Titan in achieving its end goals.
Following is an excerpt from a Q&A session after his talks.

With the creation of ‘India’s most desirable brand’, do you perceive
any tangible difference from a prior to IT implementation scenario to post IT
implementation scenario?

Creating India’s most desirable brand has many components. What IT has
helped us do is to quickly tell us the changes happening in the market.
Desirability is created by making available to the customers what he wants. This
is based on the several information available to us such as the choice of
products to the customers in both the personal wear business as well as jewelry
wear business, location of the stores, rate of sale of products and walk out of
customers.

Besides we also get to know the customer preferences, which products move
faster and which needs modification. IT has indeed helped us to increase our
speed of response to changing customer preferences.

How has IT helped you track customer preferences?

Since we are connected with all our stores and associates, daily information
is available to us at the product level itself on what sold most, in which
market, customer background and the pricing of the product also.

Why is that Titan is yet to look into B2C initiative?

Though we do have a website, we have not considered a B2C initiative
seriously. It involves several components. As we are in the niche business
segment of jewelry and personal ware, we need to track the number and kind of
customers who are seriously interested in such an initiative If the number of
people interested is too small and their choices are unique, then how do we
satisfy their needs and how do we capture all the details. We need to be able
cater to their expectations. Besides, we also need to look into the factor that
customers are wary of buying such high priced items of watches and jewelry on
the web as lot of counterfeiting happens. We are weighing all these factors and
will look into such an initiative once these components fall in line.

It is of the opinion that ‘IT is a richman’s daughter’. You don’t
know when you get the returns. You must have spent a lot on ERP and other
implementations. How do you justify it? Did you go through any anxiety for RoI?

Post 1999, we have regulated on any investment made in IT because we are
very hard-nosed and businesslike about it. When we implemented SAP ERP solution,
we were very clear about it and accepted it in its simplest form. We expected
the solution to make available information to all the people and all of them
seeing the same information. It was extremely important to us because of the
back-end complexity and supply chain integration.

It helped us to reduce our finished goods inventories to a large extent as we
were able to access detailed information on our stores across the country like
which were the stores that had inventories in excess and stores which required
goods to be supplemented. We have justified our investment in IT in many such
instances.

We did go through anxiety when we went live with our implementation for the
first time and it’s kind of a black hole period for anybody. We didn’t know
how long it would last and how the implementation would go. Fortunately we
rolled during the month of April and finished it in a record time courtesy SAP
and our in-house team.

Does IT really matters? Is IT the driver or an enabler?

IT is only an business enabler not a driver. To me strategies which delivers
value to our customers, based on chosen vision, strategies that envelopes to be
pushed, is what we need. The push could be anything from more money, more people
to more IT and more learning.

We are now choosing to global in a much bigger way and plan to enter US and
Japan market in a big way. Now I need to see whether IT is business driver or
enabler. Going global requires much more investments in terms of more money and
IT investment to help in brand building, understanding the consumer preferences
in those countries and the market trends. IT can only be an enabler for all
these decisions. However, I must concede that if my CIO is not part of the core
strategy team, then I may end up spending an amount double than planned.

But we see a live example of IT being the business driver
in the case of ICICI Bank whose entire business is driven by IT. It has managed
to capture most of the global NRI market through its ‘Infinity’ banking
purely by IT. What do you have to say on this?

In the case of ICICI bank, its strategy of customer acquisition and customer
services demands such a process. They have put in enough investment to set up
distribution networks across the country and as many ATMs which are heavily
dependent of IT solutions. Besides, ICICI operates in a different environment-in
a virtual office environment rather than conventional office environment and
hence their IT investment approach is radically different from ours. What we
need to have is a sub-servient strategy for IT to drive our business.

Do you look for RoI in your IT investment or is it just
any other investment?

I think RoI is a large indicator. The need for any IT investment is
primarily business driven. RoI is calculated for various options. If we can make
it better and then that option is chosen.

Could you tell us how many of the new initiatives that you
take up are user driven and how much comes out of IT pushing?

At Titan, everything is user driven. The CIO has to literally sell the
product, sell the ideas and push the concept of new technologies. For example,
we decided to go for RFID technology. Now this new technology was pushed hard
because the jewelry business with 5000 varieties and with a high value of
inventory requires RFID to track it.

How often does the CIO-CEO interaction happen?

We meet often and he is part of our top management decision-making meetings.
We meet twice in a month for the cash flow meeting as well as monthly review
meetings to discuss operational aspects and to discuss jewelry/watch business
exclusively.

Apart from that, we may meet during the middle of the month
when he gets reports. Not only the CIO, but the COO and CFO are also part of the
management meeting. 

Sandhya S, CIOL in
Bangalore

Recognizing Excellence Among CIOs the C Change Awards Way

For the first time, Dataquest and Cyber India Online Limted (CIOL),
India’s leading and first IT portal, will present C Change Awards in
recognition of excellence among Indian enterprise CIOs. C Change was
conceptualized by CIOL last year as an annual event to bring its community of
over 1000 CIOs face to face under one roof to learn, share and network with
peers and industry and enable them to become catalysts of change in their
organisations.

C Change Awards is built around a framework that recognizes a
CIO’s leadership qualities, business-technology understanding, people
orientation and performance through pioneering and innovative efforts. These
awards will recognize and reward excellence of CIOs in enabling their
organisations become efficient and competitive.

The Differentiator

The focus of C Change Awards is to understand:

• The extent of reach and spread of IT within Indian
  enterprises

• IT prevalence of usage within the Indian enterprises

• The efforts of the CIOs in enabling IT

"We have conceived of C Change Awards in conjunction with CIOs and
therefore we believe that it is an opportunity for all CIOs in the country to
showcase theirs and their organization’s achievements," said Abraham
Mathew, President, Cyber India Online Ltd (CIOL). He added that the
participation does not depend on the magnitude of the achievement. Instead it is
a platform to bring forth valuable repository of knowledge to the world, and
hence a must for all CIOs to participate.

In order to ensure equal opportunity for the participants, C Change Awards
have been categorized for companies with turnovers under Rs >500 crore and Rs
<500 crore. "We believe that just as CIOL pioneered the creation of an
exclusive and largest community of Indian CIOs through its Enterprise Connect, C
Change Awards too will become the Standard and a synonym for Excellence &
Merit, which is our vision," added Mathew.

More details on C Change Awards can be found at www.ciol.com/enterpriseconnect.
Enterprise Connect members can listen to the audio streaming of the Q&A with
Bhaskar Bhat at www.ciol.com/enterpriseconnect/content/audio.asp

'At Titan, the CIO has to sell new IT initiatives'

IT is an integral part of any enterprise. At Titan, IT is at the heart of our
business and we chose a business strategy that delivered value to all our
stakeholders and customers. We did go through anxiety and apprehension when we
embarked on our IT mission. However, with the adopting of right strategy, we
were able to overcome the initial hiccups. The right strategy evolved out of a
strong belief in our processes, which came from ‘experience.’

And the ‘experience’ came from overcoming inherent impediments to
challenges unique to the company. Being in the accessory business, which is
highly volatile and entirely driven by disperse customer preferences, we face
few unique challenges. Disperse and heterogeneous customer preferences, high
variety of products with new launches, distribution and manufacturing complexity
and competition from grey market and international brands, all of which required
us to have strong back end process and tightly integrated supply chain. Hence IT
is indeed at the heart of our business process.

We had strategized from the very beginning itself to invest in IT year on
year and investment in business oriented projects. We were very clear on each
project having defined objectives and to involve business managers actively. CIO
involvement was critical for evolving business strategies.

We carried out SAP implementation in the mid-nineties and consolidated during
1998-2000. We also implemented B2B solution to leverage Internet for order
handling, tracking and visibility. Last year, we went in for MIS on Intranet.
This year we plan to go for ERP implementation for our jewelry division Tanishq,
and starting an employee portal.

One of the key benefits that we realized with the IT implementation was that
we were able to offer our customers the right product with the right price at
the right time. IT helped us to create the ‘most desirable brand of India’.

Besides, IT helped us to quickly analyze the changing customer tastes, the
market trends and create products accordingly.

The speed of response increased
and enabled us to stay connected to all our vendors at the product level.

When it comes to CIO-CEO interaction, I feel that it all depends on how well
a CIO puts across a right perspective to the CEO on any projects and how well he
vibes with the CEO. It comes from right understanding based on strong belief,
which comes from deep experience.

It’s important for a CIO to have good communication with the CEO on all
issues and convince him about the viability of new technologies. In fact, that
was how implementing RFID technology was conceived of and I believe that RFID is
the technology of the future.