Asian Paints is a pioneer in deploying tablet-based mobility. By Mehak Chawla
Asian paints embarked on its mobility journey back in 2005. By 2010, the company’s management felt that the solution that it was using had run its course. Moreover, the technology partners that Asian Paints was working with for the mobility solution also announced end of life for that particular technology. The company commenced looking for an apt mobility platform that could serve the needs of its vast sales force of 700-800 people that frequently travels across the country, including to areas that lack decent connectivity.
According to Manish Choksi, Chief, Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints, a couple of things in the macro environment determined the need for a sophisticated mobility platform. The first was the ongoing revolution in the tablet space. Tablets present a form factor that’s larger and more convenient for consuming content or even updating it than a 3- or a 4-inch smartphone.
“Our idea was to leverage the tablet explosion,” said Choksi. The second thing was that, with the growing use of smartphones by his user base, Choksi was beginning to feel the need to control these devices. These factors culminated in an inflection point for Asian paints in 2010. Choksi said, “The other factor, totally out of our control, was that SAP went ahead and announced the acquisition of Sybase and started to talk about pre-built connectors to their systems etc.”
Since Asian Paints was already running a variety of SAP systems including ERP and CRM, it began evaluating Sybase’s offerings. Although the company was running several solutions from SAP including ERP, CRM and MPP it also used PLM from IBM eschewing a one-vendor approach.
There were other elements that came into play in the process of moving to a more elaborate mobility platform. At that point in time, the manufacturer was not looking for a consumer development platform from the mobility perspective. That story is a little different today but, back then, it was looking at an enterprise mobility development platform.
The decision was taken to deploy Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) and Afaria. “We closed the licensing in 2011 and started the implementation around October,” informed Choksi. The implementation was completed sometime in January 2012, followed by a couple of months of testing, auditing etc.
Deployments galore
Although the prime objective of Choksi and his team were to deploy a scalable mobility solution for the organization, there were many things that began to happen simultaneously with the development of the mobility platform. The deployment of Afaria was one such thing. Then there were other aspects such as customized applications for other functions as well as security and control issues pertaining to the devices.
With so much happening simultaneously, rolling out a mobility platform became a complex process. Some on-the-ground challenges made things worse. The first challenge was that SUP was not available on Android. As a result, Choksi’s team had to work with SAP Development to ensure that they delivered an app for Android. “We wanted to support Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) and had to work with SAP for that,” elaborated Choksi. Asian Paints got the business process going alongside the back end work for MBO even as the front-end work on the Android app was in progress.
The next hurdle came in the form of connectivity issues. “One of the key reasons that we chose Sybase was for its in-sync technology. Although the mobile revolution is omnipresent in India and globally and constant connectivity is a reality for those who live in cites, when you travel to the hinterland, you cannot take connectivity for granted. Our field force often ventures into places where connectivity is poor or non-existent.” SUP provided a mature platform in terms of syncing when online so that the app could be used in an offline mode as well.
The deployment of Afaria proved simpler since it was a ready to use, plain vanilla product. However, here too the iOS vs. Android issue cropped up. Choksi explained, “The implementation challenge was that iOS is far ahead of Android in terms of features and functionality. Catching up is going to be a big part of our journey.”
Another problem was with regard to the choice of screen size. The company ruled out the smaller smartphone screen right from the start, since it wasn’t feasible to do data entry on the same. The debate was on to choose between 7- and 10-inch tablets. In the end, the 7-inch tablet won. “We went in for 7-inch tablets as we felt that a 10-inch product needed the use of two hands for using it. We tried all these things with our sales force and even created a mockup app that allowed them to interact with the device,” said Choksi.
In another initiative around Afaria, the company deployed it for controlling the iPads that had been given to the board of directors. That was a parallel initiative to deliver content on the go to the top brass.
The next big step was the partnership with the telecom service providers as the company wanted to ensure that the devices would only be used to connect to its corporate network rather than for Internet access.
“We chose to go with Vodafone although we will necessarily have to partner with other service providers because, in certain parts of the country, their networks will be better,” remarked Choksi.
Together with these mobility developments, there was a parallel initiative to roll out all the workflows of the company on to mobile platforms. These were to be online apps rather than the online/offline mode adopted for the sales force. As a result of this, Choksi is hopeful that BYOD will become a reality at Asian Paints in a few months time.
Currently, the manufacturer is in the second phase of deployment and it is looking to bring in additional functionality.
In the pipeline
Choksi revealed that, as of now, metrics weren’t something that he could talk about, since it had only been a few months since the solutions had been deployed. “However, the feedback has been positive and people are demanding that we roll it to the area manager level. We have now gone all the way to the GM Sales. All the retail sales team will have this app,” revealed Choksi.
According to him, a consumer mindset was emerging in the organization. “We have launched the first consumer-based app on Android and we are beginning to think about a consumer strategy around mobility.”
While it is not a pressing concern as of now, challenges pertaining to employee privacy are expected to appear on the horizon. “Challenges with regard to privacy and wiping employee data, which Indian employees won’t care too much about as of now, will arise. However, as awareness rises, they will start asking these questions.”
Then there’s the TCO equation of a laptop vs. a tablet.
Listing the challenges that he faced going forward, Choksi said, “The partner ecosystem is not yet well developed in India. Even in the partner ecosystem, skills on visualization are lacking. Organizations need to hire an art school designer from an advertising background. We have a long way to go in terms of the look and feel of our apps.”
Hopes around HANA
As of now, Asian Paints is using a Business Warehouse as its current enterprise data warehouse. Despite the system being scalable and dealing with data in cubes, it is not meant for analytical purposes. “It can solve the reporting problem, but it can’t handle the analysis aspect. For that, you need a comprehensive data set. For instance, if you were to query the system about the bestselling colors at Color World outlets across the country, it would be difficult for BW to provide an accurate answer,” observed Choksi.
Consequently, Choksi has gone on to implement HANA for analytics. “With HANA, we are clear that we can provide such data at a minute’s notice,” he affirmed.
As of now, they have a smaller user set of around 30-50 users for HANA. However, Choksi expecting to see the democratization of data in the organization. “People would want to run this on mobile devices. Therefore, we are tying this into the mobility scenario. We are going to look at casual BI users, who use it once a year or once a quarter, rather than the niche ones,” said Choksi.
“HANA allows us to enhance the investment that we have already made. For instance, we can turbocharge our BW data cubes through it,” he added.
Since it has not been even a month since the company finished its HANA implementation, there are no tangible numbers to be given but benefits like the speedy generation of OD reports and management of large data sets are visible.
Asian Paints’ contact center receives 7 lakh calls a month and makes another 3 lakh outbound calls. Choksi hoped that having real time analytical capabilities at the contact center level could make the agents potentially shift from taking orders to selling solutions.
He believed that in-memory was here to stay and that any glitches would be taken care of as the technology matured. For instance, HANA in its current nature and form is meant to analyze video and sentiments etc. It’s mostly structured data and SAP would have to work on the unstructured bit, he felt. Despite all that, Choksi’s hopes for HANA remained high.
