The Hindu Business Line : Leveraging technology for optimal efficiency

WAL-MART has a fleet of a score aircraft to ferry its executives to various parts of its empire. The company expects its associates to stay in a budget motel when they go on buying trips to manufacturer locations. Visitors pay for a cup of coffee or soda even at the company's headquarters. And employees follow the `10-foot rule', which requires every employee to greet a customer who came within ten feet.

All this and more, you can read in Kannan Ramaswamy's case included in Cases in the Environment of Business, edited by David W. Conklin, from Sage Publications (www.sagepublications.com) , brought out in partnership with the Richard Ivey School of Business. Wal-Mart has been leveraging technology to maximise operational efficiency, points out Ramaswamy. "Very early on, the company realised the value of proactive investments in technology and deployed a private satellite network." Using this and EDI, the company captures store sales data, in real time.

The author explains how every time a customer makes a purchase, the point-of-sales system transmits the details of the transaction through satellite network to the warehouses, where inventory management happens.

Would you believe that the massive structures of warehouses don't so much store inventory but act as venues for `cross-docking'? Thus, goods move from an inbound truck to an outbound truck, through conveyors "to route the correct merchandise to each truck", all in about 10 minutes. The replenishment cycle is, at the maximum, 48 hours. Wal-Mart uses data mining, to gain insights about its customers, and understand regional differences.

In a section on `managing within alternative government structures' is a case on Thai Telecom by Brock Judiesch, who informs how `an unwieldy web of laws and regulations' lay at the root of telecom privatisation in Thailand. Changes came through, though. For instance, the Evidence Act was amended in 1997 to allow the use of electronic records as evidence in courts, writes Judiesch. Also, "the Electronic Transactions Act (July 1998) was enacted to provide a legal foundation for electronic signatures, and gave predictability and certainty to contracts formed electronically."

The next case, `Lucent in India', by Harnek Minhas, informs how the company evolved. "In 2000, Lucent's operations in India were grouped under several divisions. Its systems group, the largest, looked after the sales of its switching and transmission equipment to various telco and ISP customers. The software group handled the network management systems and billing software products."

To know how Citigroup coped with supervision of Internet content by the Chinese Government, you need to read Conklin's case titled, `Citigroup in post-WTO China'. Don't forget that the bank was `ahead of the curve' with regard to technology and financial innovation! Read also about Dell's dilemma in Brazil, in a case by Roy Nelson. Most of Dell's success could be attributed to its revolutionary business approach, the Direct Model, explains Nelson. "Dell shipped its products to its customers directly from the factory, without any intermediary retailers."

Read this instructive snatch about Dell's encounter with Rio de Janeiro's investment promotion agency: The head of that agency was accustomed to long drawn-out negotiations with automobile firms that sometimes lasted for a year or more, so he made "a very low initial offer for financial incentives to Dell, expecting the company to come back with a counter offer." What happened then? "He was stunned when the Dell executives, accustomed to making decisions on a much speedier basis, never returned." Happens in our states too?

Other cases of interest to techies should be the ones on Poland's telecom industry, Malaysia's Multimedia Development Corporation, Intel's site selection in Latin America, and Acer's decision on manufacturing in China. Worthwhile read.

Can IT lead to economic development?

THE Indian software industry is a major success story, but there is also the `haemorrhaging' brain drain, write Ashwani Saith and M. Vijayabaskar, in a book about information and communication technologies that they have edited, ICTs and Indian Economic Development, from Sage (www.indiasage.com) . The dozen or so papers in the book are from a 2002 conference on the subject held in Bangalore.

Chapter 1 is on `the diffusion of information technology' by C.P. Chandrasekhar, where he cautions about the `reduction in the onsite-offsite cost differential', arising in part from `suction effect'. "Learning from the success of Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US, the US Government itself and governments in other developed countries like Germany, France and Japan are selectively relaxing their work permits, to facilitate the flow of the best Indian software engineers to their countries," he explains.

Nagesh Kumar's article is about the software industry development; he calls for the strengthening of R&D, especially for product development. "India's domestic market is sizable enough to provide a testing ground for these products," he writes, but one only hears how major players here aren't interested in the Indian market. K.J. Joseph and Vinoj Abraham speak about a new metric, ICTC for `index of claimed technological competence' of firms. Their study suggests that ICT firms are upwardly mobile in terms of competence. "We need to have a diffusion policy, instead of an export-oriented IT policy," say the authors.

In a paper on human capital, Suma S. Athreye rues that the precarious state of public finances limits the ability of the central and state governments to expand tertiary education. "Has the New Economy created wealth?" asks J. Dennis Rajakumar in a study of IT companies. The answer is `yes', though the author isn't happy that the additional wealth is `concentrated in a few hands'.

Balaji Parthasarathy's paper titled, `The political economy of the computer software industry in Bangalore', laments the absence of "a technical community committed to innovation". Maximo Torero, Shyamal Chowdhury and Arjun S. Bedi write about telecommunications; they foresee "enhanced economic performance driven by the benefits that accrue due to increasingly connected economic agents".

To know about `innovation capability in India's telecommunications equipment industry', read the chapter by Sunil Mani, with a chart depicting `index of innovation capability'. Rakesh Basant and G.R. Ramadesikan write on `adoption of communication standards', and argue that standard setting should take into account "the interdependence of various technological domains."

Investors may find interest in Meena Abraham Chacko's paper, `Role of ICT in the development of the Indian stock market'. The introduction of new technologies has increased trade volumes, but it has not made the market broad-based, notes the author. Other chapters are: Kaushalesh Lal on e-business; Vijayabaskar on the automobile industry; Wensheng Wang on the digital divide; and Meine Pieter van Dijk on India vs China.

Useful collection.

Tailpiece

"We created a new post in the company, VP (Recycle Bin)."

"To delete unwanted files?"

"And also to resurrect the wrongly deleted ones!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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