An IDG Custom SOLUTIONS initiative IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Transforming Business Through Judicious Application of IT

to Track Supply Chain

Tata Teleservices Limited reaches out to its pre-paid customers via a countrywide network of almost 6000 distributors who deal with recharge cards and handsets. The ability to track product uptake geography wise at these distributors has given the telecom giant a competitive edge.

Training Tally

PLUS
INTERVIEW
Ravi Viswanathan, Head, Telecom Services Business, TCS, speaks about the trends and challenges in the telecom sector. He also gives his inputs on what operators can do to keep in check the fall in Revenue per User (RPU).

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

Better decision making

 Company Tata Teleservices Ltd. Industry Telecommunication Offering Country wide GSM and CDMA connections.

partner visibility ENABLES

Tata Teleservices Limited has a wide range of mobile offerings that are delivered to consumers via a countrywide network of almost 6000 distributors. The ability to track product uptake geography wise has given the telecom giant a competitive edge. Here is how its Executive President Enterprise Business and Technology, A.G. Rao achieved this.

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

espite the exploding subscriber base, telecom companies are seeing a fall in RPU (Revenue per User). The dynamics in this market have clearly moved beyond the basics of carrier networks and the waging of price wars. The increasing customer base offers something to every service provider, but those that take the biggest chunk of this pie are the ones who optimize their processes better, have in-depth knowledge of their markets and ensure not a single customer is turned down. Tata Teleservices Limited (Tata Tele) utilized IT to bring in a transformation in managing their distributors.

This solution has given us a unique competitive edge. No other telco has such a tool currently.
AG RAO, Executive President - Enterprise Business and Technology, Tata Teleservices Ltd.

The Channel Challenge

Telecom service providers cater to their prepaid customer base through partners who form a network of distributors and retailers. Given the size of the market, in terms of customers, distributors, and number of products (various recharge schemes as well as handsets), telecom service providers encounter various challenges in catering to varying customer demand and tracking the performance of their products. For a pan-India telecom service provider like Tata Tele, knowing which of its products work better in specific regions and which dont enable strategic planning. Its the sort of data that enables demand forecasting and management of physical products like recharge scratch cards. This calls for knowing how many units have been consumed of a given product in near real time. The obvious approach which other telecom companies tried, with only partial success was installing an application at the distributors end that was tied online to the telecom companys ERP. Telecom executives would then ask distributors to enter sales data (like information regarding which products have been bought by a particular retailer) manually. The application would then send that information to the service providers ERP. Sounds simple, but theres a catch: almost all distributors already use an accounting software, the ubiquitous Tally, to manage their finances. By asking distributors to input data into the service providers application, telecom executives were basically asking them to replicate work without any tangible benefit to them. The automation of such data flow across the distribution channel enables sales and performance tracking across all the distribution points. But this

INDIA MOBILE STATS

June 2010: 600 million mobile subscribers. Gartners prediction for 2014: 990+ million.

automation was met with various roadblocks that are common across service providers. Firstly, it was not possible to implement standard business processes and rules across the distribution channel due to localized sales management solutions owned by distributors (mostly based on Tally) . Combined with the distributors reluctance in keying the same data manually in different systems, deploying a separate tool was out of question (this would have been the standard approach). In many parts of the country, persons running distributorships are not well versed in English, which is the default language adopted in the GUI in India. To gain acceptance from the entire channel partner base, the solution had to be multi lingual.

The Solution: PULSE Power

Tata Tele and their long standing technology partner, TCS were not about to take the conventional route by either coaxing channel partners, or by offering expensive incentive schemes to garner channel support. TCS went beyond problem solving, by completely circumventing the problem itself. The project that made this happen was Pulse a combination of Tally, the commercial accounting package, and a centralized backend system that brings the comprehensive list of functionalities for both internal channel stakeholders and external channel partners (distributors). TCS knew only too well that Tally is a favorite amongst distributors and

TRANSFORMERS CASE STUDY

with some quick thinking, they got a customized version of Tally built for them. The look and feel remained the same except for a new, nifty, yet unobtrusive feature. Now information entered into Tally is captured by an add-on and sent to Tata Teles ERP system when an Internet connection is detected. To the end user, this process is transparent, and they could continue to use Tally without interruption even when the update is in progress. Since channel partners did not have to put in extra effort to make this system work, they did not resent it. In fact, the system helps distributors by showing them their existing credit limit (used for e-recharges) with Tata Tele and the credit limits that various retailers have with them. The project was envisioned to transform Tata Teles channel approach by providing additional features and power to the business users, keeping the channel partners in mind. The distribution needs had to be studied in depth not only from a Tata Tele perspective but also from a distributor perspective. Some key features of Pulse that makes this possible are detailed as below: Pulse helps the company define its complete distribution hierarchy starting from senior management (business heads) to the last point i.e., retailers and maps the relationship between them functionally and geographically.

Due to the initial efforts in understanding stakeholder expectations, the roll-out was as fast as two months for the GSM products.

The inventory management module in Pulse is a key differentiator with real time inventory view helping define company specific thresholds at each distribution point. It has an auto-purchase order process to replenish stock. Primary sales (Tata Tele to distributors) and secondary s a le s ( d i s t r i b u t o r s t o retailers), and activations m a d e b y re ta i le rs a re captured real time, thus enabling Tata Tele, as well as distributors to view performance online. Pulse addresses a key requirement from the distributors a single system with single data entry to manage both companys needs as well distributors needs against having two separate systems. Since Pulse is an extension of Tally, all financial record keeping of the distributorship, like books of accounts, receivables and payables, budgeting, statutory compliances are part of the solution which has gained favour from the distributors. Other key functionalities like purchase order automation, distributor claims and settlements, distributors sales and financial accounting, and channel performance monitoring are incorporated into Pulse. By design, Pulse has the ability to operate in an offline mode as well. At many locations, distributors do not have assured Internet connectivity and hence, a unique feature that has been incorporated is that, the Tally add-on actively monitors for an Internet connection and then starts the update process in the background.

The Implementation

Pulse has brought in complete visibility and control into the supply chain and made data driven decision making a lot easier.
Shirish Munj, Head - IT, Tata Teleservices Ltd .

Since the crux of this project is the sales information that gets collected from the distributors, understanding their expectations was paramount. Tata Tele conducted a series of workshops with distributors from various corners of India to understand how they perceive a solution like Pulse and their willingness to work with it. Tata Tele spent significant efforts to identify existing commercial solutions to meet the distributors expectations (which was primarily a single-application and one-time data entry). When no ready-to-deploy tools met this criterion, TCS decided to take the bull by its horns they built this ability into Tally itself.The roll-out was fast paced with a two-month window between

Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES

Project Overview
Tata Tele Distributors

A customized version of Tally is deployed at the distributor end, which reads the sales data of TataTeles products, assimilates it, and sends the same to the companys ERP. Since Tally is the de-facto accounting package at the distributors, they do not have to re-enter data. The update happens in the background without interrupting work. Tata Tele uses this data for analytics - to gain visility into product uptakes at different locations.

Retailers  Consumers

concept and go-live (for the GSM products). TCS and Tata Tele achieved this mainly due to the initial efforts put in to understand the requirements from the end users (the distributors). A solution hot house was built, involving business stake holders and distributors to get a signoff on the solution - this ensured that there was no gap between expectation and delivery. The overseeing committee consisting of a cross functional team from Tally, TCS and Tata Tele constantly reviewed the development and monitored deviations.

today with no significant integration issues or data mismatch having cropped up till date.

The Benefits
The most obvious business benefit that Pulse has brought in is that Tata Tele has not lost a single customer due to lack of stock at retailers or distributors. The efficiency of tracking products across the supply chain is now 100 percent. The time delay in knowing the stock position is now near real-time, from an earlier time window of three days. The success of this project is also due to its simplicity. Even a small distributor or a small business can be connected without a full fledged IT infrastructure. An instance of Tally and an Internet connection are all that is required. Utilizing the reach of the Tally ecosystem, which in this context is analogous to the last mile, TCS has ensured that there are no hurdles to distributors utilizing this solution.. Though Pulse is developed to meet the telcos channel management activities, it is flexible enough to be customizable for use by organizations in any domain that use a distributor set up. The project was launched as a strategic long term solution. Tata Tele and TCS are already working on taking it to the next level. Integration with hand held devices like PDAs is in the pipeline, which will enable sales persons to input and retrieve data on the move.

The Tally Integration

Tally is a desktop standalone solution with its native database, and hence, integrating it with the Oracle based backend system of Tata Tele was a technical challenge. Making matters more complicated was the fact that the data exchange is in terms of lakhs of transactions per day. A service oriented architecture was developed to ensure that data transfer happens smoothly with a error handling mechanism. Data synchronization between the Tally front end and the centralized backend system can happen either online or offline (as the system waits for an available Internet connection). To ensure data integrity, a robust mechanism was created to handle failure and ensure that every single transaction is being sent, received , acknowledged and corrected if necessary. The result of the SOA and data synchronization approach is evident