After implementing innovative ideas and making year-long
sustained efforts to ensure that they click, comes recognition in the form of
an award. And most SAS IEA winners were thrilled with the accolades they received.
| Category |
Winner |
What they feel... |
| BFSI |
HDFC Standard Life Insurance
Sunil Rawlani, Head, Information Systems & Technology |
Something that we started four-and-a-half years ago
has seen the light of day. We are seeing some kind of return. To be rewarded
by an independent body, helps the team feel that it has contributed and
made a difference. I have regarded this forum as something that takes the
IT industry quite seriously. They don’t have a motive of their own.
It’s really independent. I have attended this for all the four years
and they seem to bring in a good mix of subjects and speakers. The process
seems to be structured. There is so much happening in this country that
you need to see that it is need-based. You need to take lessons from what
is happening in the developed countries and where they have gone wrong.
So when you come here, it helps you understand what you are doing. |
| Construction and Utilities |
Larsen & Toubro
Avinash Sankholkar,
Head, IT |
It is a win-win situation for the user as well as
the IT team. It was a need that was expressed by the users and our IT team
found a solution for that, and the result is that we won this award. Last
year we had applied for nomination but in a different category. We couldn’t
make it then. We were looking forward to win the award and I am happy this
year we won.
In a knowledge economy, manpower optimisation and
its efficiency are key. This initiative was taken to improve the efficiency
of the company’s engineering group innovatively. Earlier, in our
organisation, a team member had to complete his work, and pass it on to
another, and then sometimes it was given to an outside agency or customer.
The engineering document then came with a few comments on it, which needed
to be incorporated. Now, things have become simpler. The entire process
has been mapped and role change has been optimised to get better productivity.
|
| Government and Infrastructure |
Lokvani Society
Amod Kumar, District Magistrate, Sitapur District |
This award motivates my team. People usually consider
the government to be rather laid back. Technology Senate is a great place
to meet new people and share experiences.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. In the corporate
sector, people do not step back from experimentation.
|
| Industrial Production |
Reliance Industries
Ashish Chauhan, CIO |
It’s really a great feeling for the company.
Seems that all our efforts and hard work have been recognised.
Data is not intelligence, it is the information
that makes it intelligent. An organisation that can convert data into
information with complexity in the core and simplicity at the periphery
is a true Intelligent Enterprise.
Whatever you do in IT should be oriented only to
business. Be more of a businessman than a technologist.
|
| IT and ITeS |
Hinduja TMT— HTMT
Ajay Bakshi, Head Automation & Process Improvement |
It’s great to be recognised. We know the competition
is tough. You get entries from all over the country. Your jury members are
influential, knowledgeable and they know the industry in and out. Even more
so the auditors, E&Y are a reputed name in the industry. So any entry
that has passed through this process, obviously must be deserving. There
are two aspects to it—one is that the BPO industry is the substance
as in that there is no customised solution available from any business vendor.
Second, as everything was done internally there was uniqueness. By building
the system in-house we have reduced the cost, and there will not be any
dependency on vendors in the future. |
| Health and Sciences |
Allergan India
K T Rajan, Director, Information Systems |
At Technology Senate, we have the best IT managers
present under one roof and when you are acknowledged by them it feels good.
The job of a medical representative is tough. They spend about eight to
nine hours a day in the field but their productive time is less than an
hour. Normally an MR meets a doctor for not more than one to two minutes
and that needs to be captured. The entire marketing and R&D strategy
depends on that. Secondly, for an MR, the pain area is filing reports. We
wanted to make this procedure to be an enabling tool for us. It captures
pre-call, post-call and actual call details. |
| Media and Entertainment |
AC Nielsen South Asia
Bhushan Akerkar, Executive Director, IST, South Asia |
IEA awards have been one of the coveted awards of
the industry. Therefore it means a lot for our company to win the award.
Other companies may be using this technology, but at a smaller scale. This
accolade shows that the model is not only for Indian or Asian companies
to follow, but for global companies. Success depends on two things—products
and process of collecting data. Data from 1,50,000 shops is collected by
800 people. We were using paper to collect and generate data, and a COBOL
system to process it. Now we use PDAs to collect data, Oracle database for
processing it and a home-grown application to generate it. This has cut
down our delivery time from 18 to 20 days to 10 to 12 days. |
| Retail and Consumer Products |
Shopper’s Stop
Unni Krishnan T M, Customer Care Associate & CTO, Solutions & Technology
Team |
The Technology Senate is a great place to showcase
the innovations developed and conceptualised by enterprise across verticals.
It also acts as a platform to showcase technology in India before the West.
It was a tough bet and quite challenging for us
to put together the presentations within the limited time-frame with so
much of IT deployment at our end.
|
| Enterprise Intelligence Platform of the Year |
Centurion Bank of Punjab
Sanjay Narkar, CTO |
It was a proud moment to receive the SAS Enterprise
Intelligence Platform of the Year Award as it recognises the efforts taken
by the bank’s team. As a bank we have taken this initiative to build
the SAS 9.x and BIS (Banking Intelligence Suite) platform for data warehousing,
business intelligence, customer intelligence, decision support, enterprise
reporting & MIS and online duplicate customer checks on a large scale.
The customer-centric approach, which the bank has taken is a differentiator
and as far as retail banking is considered the bank’s focus is always
on customer relationship management. |
