About the awards

The story behind the 2006 awards

The SAS Intelligent Enterprise Awards exist to recognise organisations who have made exemplary and innovative use of IT to deliver significant business value. Ernst & Young (E&Y) is the ‘Process Advisor’ for the Awards. The awards are given for the categories of Banking & Finance, Construction & Utilities, Government & Infrastructure, Health Sciences, Industrial Production, IT/ITES, Media & Entertainment, Retail & Consumer Products and the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform of the Year

To be considered, a company must have successfully conceptualized and implemented an Innovative IT project or successfully utilized emerging technologies that can be regarded as a pioneering effort by the industry or have built a solution from ground up that is regarded as a model system.

The Awards Process

There are six steps in the process starting with inviting applications for the Awards. Once the applications are received by Indian Express (as a completed questionnaire along with additional documents to substantiate the claims being made vis-a-vis the initiative), invalid applications are disqualified and preliminary screening to compile the category-wise list of final nominees is undertaken by Indian Express and the jury which evaluates and rates nominees. The jury this year comprised of Manish Choksi, Chief—Corporate Strategy & CIO, Asian Paints, Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President & CTO, Reliance Capital, Satish Naralkar, MD & CEO, NSE.IT, Sunil Mehta, Sr. VP & Area Systems, Director JWTE&Y, and Terry Thomas, Partner, Ernst & Young. E&Y tabulates the scores to determine the winners. Scoring is done on a scale of 1 to 9 with 1 being Meets none of the criteria and 9 standing for Meets all of them.

The Winners
Sunil Rawlani	Avinash Sankholkar	Amod Kumar
K.T. Rajan	Ashish Chauhan	Ajay Bakshi
Bhushan Akerkar	Unni Krishnan T M	Sanjay Narkar

Evaluation Criteria

The nominees are judged upon a number of factors: is the concept ground breaking? Does it confer competitive advantage? Does any other competitor already have the same or a similar system in place? Has an emerging technology been used? Is it a leading practice? How many people in the organisation have been impacted by this initiative? Other than this the tangible benefits in terms of cost savings, increase in revenues, decrease in IT spend and revenue leakage prevention are considered as is the efficiency of the implementation and the hurdles faced and overcome.

The nominees

Banking & Finance

HDFC Standard Life Insurance was nominated for Wonders (Workflow on Demand and Enterprise Retrieval Systems) while SBI Life Insurance Co. Ltd. was in the running for an end-to-end Transaction Portal.

HDFC Standard Life Insurance won. Sunil Rawlani, Head - Information Systems & Technology says, “We started this initiative four and a half years back and we are seeing some kind of returns. To be rewarded by an independent body helps the team feel that they have contributed and made a difference.”

Construction & Utilities

Hindustan Construction Company was in the fray for Project Sankalp: SAP & SAP BW Implementation while Larsen & Toubro Ltd was nominated for its Document, Time and Project Engineering Management System. Larsen & Toubro won and Avinash Sankholkar, Head - IT comments, “The initiative has improved the efficiency of the engineering staff. Earlier one team member had to complete his work, pass it on to another, and then sometimes it went outside the agency to the customer. The engineering document used to return with comments that had to be incorporated. The entire process has been mapped and optimised.”

Government & Infrastructure

Delhi State Industrial & Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd. was nominated for its Physical File Monitoring System while Lokvani Society was up for seamlessly connecting people in rural UP to decision makers in the Government. Lokvani Society won and Amod Kumar, District Magistrate, Sitapur District says, “This award will motivate my team. People usually consider the government to be laid back.” He advices fellow decision makers in the government sector, “Don’t be afraid to experiment. In the corporate sector, people do not step back from experimentation. In the government sector, however, there is no profit from such initiatives.” Which he believes is the reason for ground-breaking IT deployments in government being few and far between. This needs to change if India is to truly become an IT superpower.

Health Sciences

Allergan India was nominated for its Sales Force Automation Implementation using PDAs; Wockhardt for its SAP Implementation. Allergan India won and K. T. Rajan, Director - Information Systems says, “There are quite a few awards that you get when your business does well. This award is for information security professionals. At Technology Senate, you have the best IT managers present under one roof and it feels good to be acknowledged by them.

Here the system eased the job of a medical representative who spends about 8-9 hours a day but whose productive time is less than an hour. A rep meets a doctor for about 1-2 minutes and that needs to be captured in its totality as Allergan’s marketing and R&D strategy depend on this.

“I won’t be surprised in next two years if the FMCG, large scale distribution companies would go for such solutions,” comments Rajan.

Industrial Production

Gujarat Ambuja Cement was in the running for its Smart Card based Vehicle Tracking System, Motherson Sumi Systems for the company’s Shop Floor Control System and Reliance Industries for the company’s B2B e-Commerce Portal for Petrol and Petrochemical Products. Reliance Industries won and Ashish Chauhan, CIO had this to say, “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 of the periphery is a true Intelligent Enterprise. Whatever you do in IT should be oriented only to business. Be more of a businessman rather than a technologist.”

IT/ITES

Hexaware Technologies was nominated for its Knowledge and Learning Management Program while Hinduja Technologies [HTMT Ltd.] was up for the company’s GIPMS-Global Information and Performance Management System. Hinduja TMT (HTMT) won. Ajay Bakshi, Head Automation & Process Improvement says, “The competition is tough. The jury is influential and knowledgeable and it knows the industry inside-out. The auditors, E&Y, are a reputed name. So any entry that has passed through this entire process must deserve it.”

He cited the lack of a customized solution for the BPO industry as the reason for his team going ahead and creating a system from scratch. “With our huge assignments we had no option but to do it ourselves for the future of the organisation,” says Bakshi.

Media & Entertainment

Crest Animation was in the running for RenderMAX on High-Performance Computing Platform while AC Nielsen ORG MARG was up for the use of PDA technology in the field of Market Research for Retail Audits. AC Neilsen South Asia won and Bhushan Akerkar, Executive Director, IST, South Asia says, “IEA is among the coveted awards of the industry. It means a lot for our company to win this award as it gives us recognition for implementing an award that was one of its kind in the market research industry. Other companies might be using this technology, but at a small scale and not from Jammu & Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Porbandar to Tawang. This accolade recognises that the model is not only for Indian or Asian companies to follow, but for global companies. It will be cherished.”

Retail & FMCG

Intrex India was up for the Itz Cash Card: Pre-paid Management System, Marico Ltd. for its Supplier Portal Implementation for Copra Procurement and the Shoppers Stop Group Companies for the IT roll-out at HyperCITY. The winner was Shopper’s Stop. Unnikrishnan T M, Customer Care Associate & CTO, Solutions & Technology Team says, “Technology senate is a great place to showcase the innovations developed and conceptualised by enterprise across the verticals. It is a platform to showcase technology in India before the West.”

SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform of the Year

Centurion Bank of Punjab was given this special award and Sanjay Narkar, CTO says, “It was a proud moment to receive the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform of the Year Award at Technology Senate 2006 as recognises the efforts taken by the bank’s team.”

The bank has built a SAS 9.x and BIS (Banking Intelligence Suite) platform for data warehousing, business intelligence, customer intelligence, decision support, enterprise reporting & MIS and on-line duplicate customer checks on a large scale. As far as retail banking is considered the bank’s focus is always on customer relationship management.