Winning by Wireless

IT implementation at Tata Teleservices Maharashtra covers a whole spectrum of
key processes essential for a telecom services company: billing, customer-care,
revenue assurance and collection, as well as finance and retail sales. The
company has also deployed IT to create online sales operations through
franchisees in Mumbai and other part of Maharashtra.

It has demonstrated the ability to quickly migrate from one billing system to
another in four months without disrupting the existing one. The move was made
more out of compulsion than choice as it had to rapidly migrate to a new system.

The company has been able to measure returns on core areas such as billing,
customer care, retail sales, revenue assurance and finance-crucial areas in
taking the measure of a telecom services company's success-through
collections percentages sorted by due date, monthly closing date, subscriber
activation per day, and so on.

The company has demonstrated extreme innovation by deploying wireless WAN on
a fixed wireless telephone for small retail shops in a few states. For them, it
meant savings of Rs 20,000 per month on communication costs. This had not been
tried out anywhere else and was the first of its kind in India, opening up the
gates of wireless WAN connectivity in a unique way for the organization.

By setting up wireless WAN, Tata Teleservices extended the sales point right
up to the doorstep of the consumer, ensuring more sales and better customer
care. It helped the company to increase sales by about 300% in 3 months. This
was done despite risks such as people from outside the company accessing the
systems, the need for a support-base of such large number of franchises as well
as at training small retail shop owners.

As an aside, the company opted for AMD processors to achieve a target of
reducing spend on PCs by about 20%. Though the Tata Group was extensively on
Intel-based systems, Tata Teleservices managed to add value through cost savings
and improved performance, besides paving the way for AMD to address the Indian
corporate in a big way. Tata Teleservices command perfomance has ensured that
the award in the Extended Management category goes to Alok Kumar, CIO of Tata
Teleservices.