IT Leaders

Managing software licensing

Hilal Isar Khan shares his views on how Honda Siel manages software licenses and reveals the secret behind some innovative software deployments

As we are a global company, we have global agreements with most of the OEMs. For example we are under the IBM passport advantage program and we also have Microsoft EA and Select agreement at the global level. Based on the number of licenses you are entitled to a certain discount and you need not discuss discounts every time you deal with these companies. However, for me discounting is not the end of software licensing.

What is important is that as your user base is growing, how you optimize and maintain the overall cost of software licensing. Therefore, we have divided different set of internal users. For Microsoft Office, the need is for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, not necessarily to be met by Microsoft Office only. There is a set of users in the organization doing a lot of repetitive, non-productive work and whether they use Microsoft Office or any other platform, is absolutely OK with us. For example we have Lotus Notes in which we get a Microsoft-like solution bundled with it. We are leveraging this solution to get the functionalities of Word, Excel and PowerPoint without adding any extra cost to the licenses.

With larger software, we club machines and CPUs to see how we can optimize or virtualize CPUs so as to take care of overall licensing requirements. There are multiple issues and multiple solutions at various levels but you can control it or fight it only up to a certain level. Beyond that, you will have to surrender yourself to licensing requirements and costs.

Software deployments

We have a planning and forecasting solution where we capture the voice of the end customer and the dealer in the forecasting process and it is directly accumulated and consolidated. Once it is consolidated, it is linked with our production department, which helps us to fix our production plans, exploiting our bill of material and releasing our delivery schedule and delivery plan. So the overall cycle, from forecasting to order fulfillment to the end customer, has shrunk to a great extent. This is helping in the reduction of the overall cycle from the end customer’s point of view and even from the organization’s point of view we benefit as the overall cycle is squeezed and hence whatever time we save has a direct impact on our costing and in our ability to serve the customer in a better manner. Therefore, this solution helps in taking care of basic customer satisfaction and coming closer to the customer’s need and demands.

We have implemented a quality management control system to track the quality of the vehicles that we produce. We have deployed, a first of its kind solution in India called Servigistics, which is a solution for planning and forecasting related to spare parts. It has almost each and every algorithm and each and every possible scenario related to forecasting of a supply chain, logistics, specifically for spare parts. We will have significant reductions in our inventory carrying cost using this software.

We capture a lot of data and analyze it in a specific format. Now, when we go for an expert and specialized solution like Servigistics, which is based on a lot international best practices and numerous algorithms, a lot of raw data is available to it. It has the beauty of churning it out and throwing you the results, which you might have been overlooking in the past because you were doing it on a piece of paper using simple formulas.

Hilal Isar Khan is Head, Corporate IT at Honda Motors India