“Explaining business value and gaining the confidence of top management and assuring users of the technology that their life would improve are the success factors,” says T G Dhandapani by Anoop Verma
“My entry into the field of IT was rather accidental!” says T G Dhandapani. Coming from someone who has done quite well in his IT career, this statement is surprising. But Dhandapani insists that he didn’t make any conscious effort to carve an IT related career for himself. He began his career in finance and in 1991 he rose to the post of COF. For the next three years, he handled business planning operations, and then moved to manufacturing operations.
“I was head of the Die Casting Division of Sundaram Clayton for three years. I handled production, quality, maintenance and commercials,” says Dhandapani. “Later I joined the task force to build half a million capacity two-wheeler manufacturing plant at Mysore. After completing the project, my first thought was “what next ?”
Y2K & the making of a CIO
It did not take long for Dhandapani to discover the answer to the question – What next? This was the period when the issues related to Y2K were cropping up. The company entrusted him with the responsibility of implementing the solutions to tackle the Y2K issue. While working on this project Dhandapani had his first exposure to IT. This was also the time when the company was planning to implement ERP. The consultant who had been hired for the project implementation needed a person from the organisation to head the task-force for ERP implementation.
Three people, including Dhandapani, received the offer to be head of the task-force. Dhandapani accepted the offer. He may not have realised it then, but with this step, he was initiating a major transformation in his career. He was venturing into the world of IT. Soon he realised that on a psychological level he was rather comfortable working in IT projects. “While working in the ERP project, I realised that by nature I am an IT person,” says Dhandapani. “I feel as comfortable in an IT environment, as a fish in water.”
About the work that he is doing in TVS, he says, “I am really happy about my work in TVS. The extent of freedom that I enjoy and the faith that the management has on the IT team, is something that I can take pride in. I have very committed team members.”
Even in the post Y2K era, many of the enterprises were not fully convinced about having large-scale deployment of IT in their organisations. Dhandapani says, “So long as IT was used for data processing, the real potential of IT was not visible to most people. At the most IT was a mere productivity improvement tool for accounts and HR departments. People were worried that any large scale automation or computerisation could lead to labour problems.”
On the challenges that must be there when IT is implemented in an organisation for the first time, he says, “The challenges will be there, they are to be expected. Even I didn’t know about all the benefits that can come from IT. It is only by working on IT projects that I learned about all that can be done through computerisation.”
“In every organisation there were people who had achieved excellence in their work without making much use of IT and they were not ready to share the knowledge that they possessed with the IT guys. If computerisation was enforced on them, it led to serious resistance and in some cases, even sabotage. However, now that it has been amply proved that IT can lead to lot of benefits for the organization, most people have warmed up to it.”
Initiating new innovations in IT
Today he is responsible for the development and execution of IT strategy in 10 companies, including TVS Motor and Sundaram Clayton. The verticals in which he is working are as divergent as automotive, manufacturing, construction and power. The major IT projects that he and his team have implemented include – Lean Manufacturing, Electronic Kanban, Digitisation of TPM and NPD Process, Electronic Collaboration with Suppliers & Customers, Digitisation of New Product Development, Mobile Applications, Digital Manufacturing, Analytics, Big Data in Manufacturing, etc. Most of these solutions have been developed and implemented by the in house IT team.
One particular IT project that has proved very beneficial for the organisation is the Dealer Management System (DMS). Dhandapani says, “We have facilitated the development of the DMS – an ERP for TVS Motor Dealers. This system has been adopted by all the 1000+ dealers around the globe. We have also provided a private cloud based DMS solution to our 2000 authorised service centres.”
“We have also developed a new business model, which is called the Enabled Oil Business. This has led to the automation of all the commercial processes end-to-end. Only one person is required to handle the Rs. 100 crore business with a million transactions.” This leads to 12% savings in operating costs year after year.
Dhandapani proudly states that the 80% virtualised Data Centre that his organisation is using is under layer three certification. “TVS Motor is perhaps the first Indian company to obtain ISO 27001 certification enterprise wide,” he says.
IT as a vehicle for innovations
“It is a cliche to say that the field of Information Technology is constantly evolving, because it indeed is,” Dhandapani chuckles. He is of the view that success in IT can only come when one is step-in-step with technological evolution. You don’t need to be ahead of technology, and you certainly need to avoid getting left behind. He suggests that IT can yield best results only when the ecosystem is prepared before adoption of new technology. “Explaining business value and gaining the confidence of top management and assuring users of the technology that their life would improve are the success factors,” he adds.
In his opinion, only when the IT department is a vehicle for consistent innovation that the business can have a tangible value. The IT initiatives must also make some kind of strategic contribution to the growth of the business. For that they have to be well balanced. If the IT vertical is only focused on ensuring that the lights are switched on they will only be remembered when there is a maintenance related requirement. “IT department must endeavour to take their performance to such a level that they are remembered also when all the services are working in fine order,” he says. “It is necessary for us to bring in tangible business values.”
Shelf Engineering Initiatives
“Our IT team is responsible for Shelf Engineering Initiatives in which the IT solutions are kept ready for implementation before business users ask for it,” informs Dhandapani. “Ideas are digitised in advance based on business issues, technology trends and adoption possibilities in the market.”
So what is Shelf Engineering Concept? It is essentially a strategy to anticipate possibilities and develop a process or technology that can be put to use in future. It may not be useful today, but in three to five year period many of these technologies might become critical for the success of the enterprise. Essentially the concept reduces the new product development lead time by proactively developing solutions ahead of time. “In our own company, we found that we took longer time to develop a product if a technology or feature or process was new to us. Hence, the guideline came from our mentors that we should not mix technology and new product development. We worked accordingly to achieve shorter development cycle time,” explains Dhandapani.
“We have successfully adopted shelf engineering concept in product development. A new design for a product or part is either documented or developed to prototype stage and adopted at a later date. In the last two years alone our team has shelf engineered 16 products. IT executives have started working on “beyond current demand” and they are encouraged to come up with at least two new ideas per person every year. One important aspect of this initiative is that IT executive is stepping into the shoes of the user while testing. This enriches his perspective and the outcomes are amazing.” he adds.
When asked to name an instance where the Shelf Engineering Concept has led to some positive outcomes for the organisations, Dhandapani gives the example of the centralised MoM (Minutes of Meeting) project. He says, “In any large organisation, several structured and ad hoc meetings are held. As per standard operating procedure, minutes of the meeting is prepared in MS Word document and circulated to stakeholders of the meeting and the minutes compliance is reviewed in the next meeting. In most cases, executives look at the minutes only on the day of review and the meeting becomes a purposeless repetitive exercise and more often degenerates into a session of excuses. There is no alert to the person responsible in advance for compliance nor is there a mechanism to keep the chair person updated on the progress of work. Observing these issues, we developed a centralised MoM system using an open source platform.”
“This system automates all the processes- from request for meeting to resolution – integrated with mailing system and calendar. This project was engineered and tested within IT. After adoption in one area, there was a request from the Chairman’s office to track the action points of business meetings for ‘on-time compliance’. There was also a mandate to develop the system in three months. Since this was already shelf engineered, the MOM project was deployed in less than a day across the organisation. Now HoDs have a dashboard displaying status of actions carried out as against their promise. This enhances managerial effectiveness.”
The Nano Value Concept
How do you measure the business value of an IT project? Dhandapani is of the opinion that it is absolutely critical to measure the business value of IT delivery. Unless there is a system for measuring the business value of IT projects, it will be difficult to motivate IT managers. He believes that minimum business value from an IT project should be Rs 1 lakh. The benefits accrued are measured in Nanos , reminiscent of the price value of the Nano car for ready association.
“In Six Sigma, while measuring the defects, the move from percentage to parts per million (ppm) brought the breakthrough in the thinking about manufacturing quality. What we are aiming for is similar to that. Continuous innovation is targeted and benefits are measured on number of Nanos created per month – keeping the lights on is not value created. This target is given to every IT staff and in the first year benefit is measured irrespective of the day of implementation. From the second year onwards benefits accrued are not measured as IT contribution but considered as daily work management of the respective process. However sustenance of benefits is measured independently,” explains Dhandapani.
Dhandapani has put in place a system in the IT department for the setting up of a target of Nanos at the beginning of every year for every member of the IT staff. “A supervisor should contribute, apart from his target, at least 20 percent more than the target of his subordinates and so on. A team’s target is 20 percent more than the total individual target. This strategy is adopted to ensure that both individual and team initiatives are nurtured.”
New perspectives on IT buzzwords
He may have entered the field of IT at a later stage in life, but Dhandapani is well informed about the raging issues in this space. On the subject of Data Centre security, he says, “Data Centre security is of supreme importance. However, this is more of business de-risking rather than a security subject. As a part of business continuity plan DR system is very important. All business continuity plans are subject to the desire to de-risk. DR plans and programs are to be adopted step by step from simple back-up to real time replications. Affordability, RPO and RTO will decide the size of investment in DR.”
There has been a lot of talk about Big Data Analytics in India, but we hardly see any implementation of the technology in our enterprises. Why? Dhandapani is of the opinion that any IT concept will take longer time for implementation as it involves understanding, relevance, right fit, ROI, appetite and much else. He says, “There is nothing big in Big Data Analytics. The system is all about deriving information from multiple resources, which can be structured or unstructured. The potential business outcomes from the information can be huge.” He is of the opinion that Big Data will be helpful in converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and thereby pose a challenge to the dominant belief.
On the subject of cloud, he feels that there is a long way to go before there is any major cloud adoption by the enterprises in India. He also makes the point that cloud is more of an arrangement rather than a technology.