What CIOs Want and How They Plan
By Anuradha Ramamirtham & Priyanka Akhouri
Mumbai, Aug 8, 2007

Gopi K.Kilaru, vice president (ERP, sales and marketing, and corporate communications) of ICOMMTele and Aditi Sheth-Kejriwal, CTO of Parksons Games & Sports talk about their companies' needs and their future plans.

Gopi K.Kilaru, vice president (ERP, sales and marketing, and corporate communications) of ICOMMTele-a Hyderabad based company is a manufacturer and turnkey solution provider of telecommunications equipment for cellular, fixed, Internet, and satellite operators in India.

Want: The company realized the need for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution during its growth of businesses and employees. ICOMMTele was previously in the process of deploying 3i InfoTech's Orion ERP solution. Initially 3i InfoTech was confident about customizing requirements for the company's discreet manufacturing, but later InfoTech found it difficult to optimize the ORION package to the former's business need. Hence, they halted that deployment. The company needed a lot of customizations to meet its discreet manufacturing needs. Products in turnkey services, various telecom products, transmission line, and defense products have to be integrated into one ERP system.

Plan: The company till some time back was using FoxPro when it decided to move on to using Microsoft Navision ERP solution. The current legacy system will be replaced permanently with MS Dynamics Nav 4.0. This'll enable to automate processes that are in practice now. A lot of reporting will be developed, which will be available for all.

With this ERP solution, the company would be able to automate the employee attendence. It has been able to use Bio-Metric devices in all its office locations. All the data will be fed directly into the server, hence the payroll will be generated with the press of a button. Significant areas like finance, HR and payroll, duplication of work, MIS project wise, inter-divisional business processes, material procurement, and optimization is expected to benefit through this deployment. The project is approximately worth 1 crore and the system is expected to go live within 2-3 months.

Once the ERP implementation is successful, the company is looking at developing the intranet culture in the company, video conferencing, etc. Besides, it's planning to deploy chat servers for inter office communications.

Aditi Sheth-Kejriwal, CTO of Parksons Games & Sports - a medium-sized family business in the manufacturing industry

Want: Parksons Games & Sports needed a way to centralize sharing of data (tasks, files, feedback, contacts, and appointments), reduce repetitive knowledge transfer, and to expand. Till now the company was using e-mails to communicate and collaborate, which was rather cumbersome and didn't have a consolidated view of how projects were managed. It needed a solution that would provide a project and task management at low cost with minimum training.

Plan: The company has opted to use project management software named DeskAway. Since it's a Software as a Service (SaaS) product, the company is using and running it from the beginning without the need to install, configure, or deploy any software. It can be accessed via Web browser unlike other software that needs to be bought and installed in a desktop.

With this solution, designers operating from various parts of the country can share their artwork and send feedback. It assists them to manage and track multiple projects from one central location, and keeps them update with their sales staff. This helps the company to be system driven and organized.

The solution offers online calendar that enables scheduling and monitoring of sales staff, task, and file management. The online functioning takes care of any accidents in office including loosing data, crashing of computers, and loss of paper work. It provides multi-time zone functionality, search capability, blogs to share information, graphical reporting, and e-mail notifications to keep everyone updated of the project's progress. Additionally, one can brand DeskAway with the company logo and URL, and the dashboard allows observance of all projects.

Business benefits of this solution are that it increases efficiency, saves time, and creates a system-driven method of working. It enables clients from around the world to tap into the system through a secure login to see the progress of their projects.

The company spends less than 5% of its revenue on IT, and has an estimated IT expenditure of less than US $ 100,000.

Related Links:
What CIOs Want and How They Plan