Head to Head

An executive conversation

Aditya Birla Minacs provides customized business process outsourcing solutions focused around CRM/contact centers, marketing, finance & accounting and IT. Milind Godbole, President-Operations, Asia Pacific and Prashant Cherukur, CIO have leveraged their process, domain and technology coupled with internal IT processes to deliver customized solutions to bring business value to their clients. The duo have understood the need to have robust IT systems and processes within the company and empower their employees on varied IT usages to drive growth.

Milind Godbole President- Operations- Asia Pacific Prashant Cherukuri CIO

Where do you see the market opportunity in the new business paradigm?

MG: While the growth potential has been immense, the critical need is to shift from transactional sales to enterprise sales—which would be around solutions. Being in the contact centre space and driving client tasks, the development of point solutions which meet their needs is critical. The vertical markets such as telcom and BFSI are moving from a transactional base to service providers creating value additions. We see a good market opportunities in insurance and manufacturing in addition to BFSI and telecom verticals.

PC: The vertical lines of the businesses are fuelling growth for our industry with verticals such as telecom, infrastructure, OEM, media & entertainment, BFSI looking at complete IT outsourcing requirements.

How has the business growth been in CY 2009?

MG: While we have been focused on the global market such as North America, Canada, Europe, Phillipines, we have started focusing on the domestic market very recently. In all, Aditya Birla Minacs has over 50 clients with about 10 large clients closed this year. We have been expanding our offerings while building our ability to create a differential edge. Having a blend of IT and BPO we find that the growth is coming from our distributed delivery model, integration of IT and BPO and we are evolving a clear understanding of developing a point solution which is customer focused.

PC: With the Indian market being price sensitive, our business group is targeting tier II & III towns with a scalable and reliable platform of services. There is a change in mindset amongst the customers which is driving business.

Can you give us an instance of how information availability will make a difference to your business?

MG: Information availability is critical to our kind of organization, particularly if we have to align our growth with customer needs. Information influences us in understanding the demographics of customers, their future needs. Converting data into information and intelligence into action is possible with technology. Our IT team has built a lot of intelligence into the systems in a heterogeneous environment architecting different layers-(data base and presentation layer) providing granularity within the information.

PC: Given the mergers and acquisitions that Aditya Birla Minacs has made, there are over 25 different systems integrated within the IT framework. It was critical to take a holistic approach to integrate all the systems to provide accurate and timely information to all the team members. Creating a dashboard using a comprehensive IT tool was imperative to provide customized information be it with operational, quality, finance related and so on.

What are the significant challenges that you both have faced?

MG: The challenging tasks have been to have a robust and stable network dealing with international client. Evolving a business critical plan along with a disaster recovery plan to address all critical customers needs across geographies has been a vital challenge. With information being sensitive in nature, it is a huge task to ensure that the knowledge base is spread amongst all our employees to have a keen understanding of the customer needs.

PC: The most challenging point is how we keep the cost down while evolving strategies to drive growth. There are several negotiations on licenses and contracts which form the core challenges. The other challenge is in building new capabilities which falls under the BPO offerings.

So how does IT help in meeting these challenges?

MG: IT helps us in creating differentiators and helps us devise a self-service mechanism. IT has helped us reduce the time taken in settling our accounts internally as well as with our customers. At the backend too, the response time and resolution time of any query has drastically reduced because of the IT processes.

PC: IT helps the management in evolving an effective business process management strategy using the information from dashboards. The consolidation of processes is underway to integrate all the complex offerings to present them in a simple format.

How do you evaluate IT projects?

MG: I go by the business value that each IT project provides, while the IT department goes by the complexity of the project.

PC: Our priority for each project would be around aligning with the business strategy. We evaluate the projects based on the TCO and RoI factors.

How do you address technological challenges?

MG: We lay emphasis on understanding the technology or associated project in terms of support and its life cycle. The assurance is required with regard to readiness to take risks.

PC: The focus is on finding ways to expand the product to its life. We also work with vendor partners in working out ways to recycle to meet our application requirements.

Which are top three technologies that you would be investing in 2010?

MG: Our agenda is to introduce new platforms and give different models to our customers. Change processes are important to meet new customer demands.

PC: About 3.5% of our total revenues go towards IT expenditure to enable new technology platforms. Our key technology focus would be around virtualization, cloud computing solutions and high availability information security, which could lower the total cost of ownership and which would help us evolve newer solutions to our customers. Collaboration tools to strengthen our Intranet site are also our key focus to support diverse geographies.

What kind of trends do you think are emerging in the IT space which would be ideal in your industry?

MG: Various customized point solutions required for customers in this trend is emerging. The true sense of ITES is becoming visible now with the customers going for complete IT transformation.

PC: While cloud technology is shaping up, enterprise mobility applications are also emerging as a strong technology to drive business strategies and decision making.

geetha.nandikotkur@expressindia.com