Business - India;E-culture for Bharti staff

Leslie D`Monte

From a manual process which led to limited workplace mobility and disengaged suppliers, the telecom major has streamlined its processes and cut costs

India’s largest private telecom player — the over $5.5 billion Bharti Airtel — has just completed an 18-month organisation-wide transformation programme to enable its 25,000-odd employees imbibe an “e-culture”. The programme, involving the setting up of nearly 150 servers to handle around 150 terabytes of employee data, involved “no additional investment” since it was a part of the revenue-sharing deal with its IT outsourcing partner IBM.

Christened ‘e-tize’, the journey started on February 26, 2007, with the vision to “inject “e” into the organisation to drive technology benefits to the employee, leading to sustained organisational productivity gains. The scope of this programme included internal transformation of around 150 internal business processes, and the implementation of almost 30 software packages.

“We have always been customer-focused. Last year, we thought it was time to sharpen our focus on our employees too. Hence, e-tize is not just an IT programme, but a drive for defining and cultivating an e-culture within Bharti Airtel,” explains Jai Menon, Director, Technology and Customer Service, Bharti Airtel.

The programme revolves around five zones — productivity, convenience, security, employee development and personnel HR. As part of the productivity drive, Airtel developed a myairtel interactive portal. Besides, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) solutions too were implemented across the company. The ‘convenience’ part included a virtual private network (VPN) to give its employees access to applications from any place any time.

“It is surely encouraging tele-commuting among a section of our employees. Besides, they can get their expenses reimbursed online, complete self-certification of courses online, and get his travel (official tours) and leave sanctioned online. The possibilities are immense,” notes Menon.

Next came the ‘security’ angle. Towards this end, explains Menon, Airtel has implement the ‘stakeholder security framework or SSF’ which includes a two-factor authenticion (digital certificates, et al) process. “This implies that the network, data and application layers are very secure,” says Menon. The ‘employee development’ angle involves a ‘learning management system or LMS’ whereby employees can upgrade their knowledge online and grade themselves.

“The success of this programme was measured not only in terms of capability delivery but also in terms of acceptance and utilisation of the delivered capabilities to the fullest,” says Menon. The success of the e-tize programme can be gauged from the fact that currently 500,000 employee transactions take place every month. “Over the last 12 months, we have saved six million sheets of paper and over 1,000 trees,” adds Menon.

“The next step to further energise the adoption and reach of the e-tize programme involves the mobile enablement of key HR and ERP applications under the me-tize umbrella,” asserts Menon. Currently, around 20,000 me-tize transactions take place every month.

All of them are SMS-based currently which can be used on the “most basic of cellphones”. “Eventually”, says Menon, “we will extend the me-tize programme to a WAP browser and finally voice transactions”.