A dynamic head of functional business & IT

Debashis Roy, Vice President - IT, CESC Ltd., is a veteran in the IT industry who has the distinction of spearheading numerous IT projects for CESC and its group companies. He talked to Akhtar Pasha about the projects that he is taking up this year including setting up a new data center, disaster recovery and virtualization

Debashis Roy

Roy is an Electrical Engineer by profession but he put his career path on the fast track by switching over to Information Technology. He did his Electrical Engineering from National Institute of Technology, Durgapur in 1980 and has over 29 years industrial experience of which 18 years has been spent in the field of Information Technology. After a short stint with Steel Authority of India Limited soon after completing his engineering, Roy joined Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation or CESC in 1981 as a Management Trainee. CESC is a flagship company of RPG Enterprises and is India's first fully integrated electrical utility and it has been generating and distributing electrical power in Kolkata and Howrah since 1897. Here, Roy was exposed to various functions of the company including—Commercial, Loss Control Cell, Corporate Planning, Commercial Engineering, Corporate Communications etc. and quickly rose to become one of the youngest managers in CESC.

He completed a six month Advance Course in Computer Systems (DCA) from Tokyo, Japan in 1992. After this, Roy’s career took a sharp turn and he completely changed his career stream from engineering to Information Technology and allied areas. His experience in IT, covering a span of 18 years, includes commissioning of some of the largest IT Projects of their time. He set up Integrated Information Systems for the top management. Later in 1997, he conceptualized RPGNET, a group-wide IT initiative (called a captive network) which was widely acclaimed. He implemented five services—mail messaging, Internet, Intranet, voice communication and video conferencing on the Microsoft platform. His next project was CESC NET, a city-wide high-speed optical fiber network (which has become a data communication backbone for CESC) connecting 90 locations.

MCC and AMR projects

Meter to Cash Cycle (MCC) and AMR (Automated Meter Reading) were two prestigious projects that Roy conceptualized and implemented. The initiative was taken in order to increase and streamline revenue collection from 23 lakh consumers. Roy explained, “Our business goal was to not only optimize the MCC (billing cycle time from visiting the customer’s place, noting the meter reading and then generating and dispatching bills) but also to reduce the billing cycle time from 20 to 12 days so that we got the revenues in faster and processed bills without any errors occurring.” Under the AMR project, a high tension consumer electric meter was integrated with a chip that read the meter and a GSM modem. On a stipulated billing date, the total power units consumed by the consumer are transferred via the GSM network to a central server that records the reading and then triggers the billing cycle. “This project has impacted the billing cycle of over 15,000 high tension consumers that contribute half of CESC’s revenues. It has reduced the billing cycle time and helped in doing away with the inefficiencies associated with field staff when they go for noting meter readings, correctness of readings and dispatch related delays.”

CRM for customer acquisition

Roy said, “Our aim is to process 80,000 new customer accounts that apply for a new connection annually so that we can activate and give them a power connection within a month's time with the help of our CRM system. Without this technology, it takes several months to activate a single account before we can start billing for it. With our new processing systems, we can track account status and where the delays are at each stage of application processing. Any delay in sanctioning a new connection, would mean that revenue collection—from application fee, deposit money and usage bill—would be delayed. Additionally it has numerous benefits. It will improve the customer experience, improve visibility into our business processes and eliminate inefficiencies and errors that would have happened on account of manual intervention.”

Spencer’s Retail and PCBL projects

Roy was largely responsible for successfully implementing SAP in two industrial verticals namely manufacturing and retail in the capacity of a Project Director and CIO. In 2003, he moved (within the RPG Group) to Phillips Carbon Black Ltd (PCBL) where he proceeded to implement SAP R/3 4.7 Production Planning for Process Industries that improved the company’s production planning and helped it exploit new market opportunities (it was the fastest implementation for its time achieved in seven and a half months). From PCBL, he moved to Chennai in 2005 to head another IT project as Vice President-Systems. This time it was for Spencer's Retail (again an RPG Group company). He was entrusted with the challenging task of integrating the disparate IT Systems prevailing across the various retail formats within the Group and automating the transactional systems. After stabilizing the investment in SAP ERP, he moved back to CESC in 2007.

Top technologies for 2010

In his current capacity of Vice President-IT at CESC, he is responsible for formulating and implementing the company's IT strategy and its alignment with the organization's overall business objectives and goals.

Roy said, “My immediate focus is to bring our myriad IT systems running in multiple locations to a central location. This exercise would require me to reengineer our business processes and consolidate the disparate IT systems that we inherited using new technologies. As a first step-up in that direction, I would be setting up a new data center with disaster recovery capability. We are planning to consolidate and virtualize 18 mission critical applications such as Billing, CRM, Site Office Systems, Payroll, Web services etc. in Phase I at our new data center. Likewise I’m planning to move all 90 applications in phases. The new data center will give us high availability for the applications and IT systems that our business depends upon. Additionally, we will invest in new servers and networked storage to support our applications in a virtualized set-up. We are planning to use VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper V for consolidation and virtualization of new servers.”

To reduce the upgrades and maintenance of client desktops, Roy is planning to standardize clients based on user profiles. For example, he explained that the company would provide thin clients with just the monitor, mouse and keyboard to data entry operators (for SAP). Productivity users would have an office suite loaded on their machines and power users would have high-end clients with graphics cards and advanced software. Roy said, “We have 2,500 users and 90 business applications. Standardization, based on user profiles, will allow us to reduce costs significantly.”

Web 2.0 enablement and SOA

Roy said, “I am a big supporter of Web services and SOA, because these approaches open up new possibilities and opportunities for developing an entrepreneurial culture within organizations, as well as spurring new ideas for startups.” More than anything, Web services and SOA are paving the way for the composite or loosely coupled company, which may be an entity that exists purely as an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demand. Most of these services will be delivered through the Software-as-a-Service model, both from within the enterprise and from outside. He added that Web 2.0 would allow businesses to create more dynamic Web-based applications.

Enterprise application spending is back

According to Roy, SMBs would look at ERP projects in a different light altogether. He said, “Earlier SMBs viewed ERP projects as a way to automate their transactional systems but the market crash and weak economy in 2009 have changed their business dynamics. In 2010, many SMBs would kick-start their ERP projects to identify costs culprits and to optimize their business processes to reduce costs. Hence, reducing cost would be the single largest factor for SMBs to invest in ERP.”

Business intelligence or rather analytics would be another key technology that enterprises would be keen on during 2010. Roy explained the need for BI and analytics, “ERP is nothing but the On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) engine to capture millions of enterprise-wide business transactions generating tons of data. The data generated from OLTP transactions would feed On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) that turns the OLTP data into information that helps analysts, managers and executives gain insights through fast, consistent, interactive access to a wide variety of possible views of information that has been transformed from raw data to reflect the real dimensionality of the enterprise as understood by the user.”

Roy is also thinking of using analytics on his company’s OLTP data to gain business insights by using an in-house developed tool (Online Consumer Engine System). CESC has split its business operations into four zones—North, South, East and West. Its high-net-worth customers that typically would consume over 5,000 units of electricity in a month can easily be identified using analytics that will further slice and dice the OLTP data to provide meaningful zone-wise insights (so that the company can focus on the zones that give more revenue and are the most profitable) and map it against time (consumption peaks/lows) etc.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com