The Hindu Business Line : Rlys to adopt new bidding process for HR online project

The Railways decided to adopt the BOOT model as this would spare it from making any heavy upfront investments and the cost would be spread over a longer period.

Mamuni Das

New Delhi, March 26

To implement its plans to move all its human resource management functions to an IT platform, the Indian Railways is adopting a new bidding process for interested IT firms.

Firms may have to bid on the charges they would levy per employee per month for about seven years. The Railways has decided to implement the project on a build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) basis.

Earlier, the Railways was contemplating the project implementation on a turnkey contract basis.

However, it decided to adopt the BOOT model as this would spare Railways from making any heavy upfront investments. From a Railways perspective, the cost would be spread over a longer period and subject to satisfactory project implementation.

“As per our estimates, the total project cost would be in the range of Rs 350 crore for the IT firms,” said a Ministry official. This is the first software project for the Railways to be taken up on a BOOT basis.

INTERESTED FIRMS

Firms vying for the project include global majors, with software packages designed specifically for human resource management, such as SAP and Peoplesoft (which was acquired by Oracle). Also IT firms that that have evinced interest in implementing the project include TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Siemens, Microsoft, IBM and CapGemini.

PROJECT BENEFITS

The project would help the Railways serve its 1.4 million employees and one million pensioners in a better manner. For instance, an employee can move applications for advance payments and leave online. “This would help us align our human resources to business requirements in future. If any technology adoption leads to employee surpluses, we can redeploy them faster,” Mr A.K. Nigam, Adviser-Industrial Relations, Railway Board, told Business Line.

Indian Railways’ employees, who are scattered across the country (the Railways has 7,000 stations), can also access information on their seniority, medical benefits, leave position online.

The project would also have specially designed e-learning packages. “Our training management would be better. It would be easier for us to identify staff who have not received specific trainings and arrange trainings accordingly,” said Mr Nigam, adding that the project would result in saving costs for the Railways by reducing revenue leakages.

Crew management will be another key aspect of the project. “On the whole, the project would help deliver internal services to our staff in a much better manner. This, in turn, would help our staff deliver better services to the external customers,” Mr Nigam said.

IMPLEMENTING AGENCY

The IT arm of Indian Railways, CRIS, would be implementing the project.

The Railways is preparing the bid document and finalising the qualifying criteria and service level agreements for bidders.

Now, this is how it would broadly work. The winning consortium would have to start implementing the project in a phase-wise manner. Upon successful implementation for each phase, the Railways would start paying a service charge of certain amount per employee per month to the consortium. After about seven years of operating the package, the ownership would be transferred to the Railways.

More Stories on : Software | Railways | Human Resources

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