5 Indian CIOs share their enterprise app strategy.

Within any organization, enterprise apps form the very back-bone of the business — be it something as simple as a workflow app for approval of Purchase Order or something as critical as an analytics application running over ERP and CRM, throwing up facts and numbers on a mobile reporting dashboard. In the past few years, most large businesses have matured in terms of implementing basic enterprise apps like ERP, CRM, HRMS etc. More and more CIOs are evaluating the best possible ways to make the most out of the available data that is being churned out by these enterprise apps to bring tangible benefits to the business. The major trend that is gaining traction within enterprises is that of mobile-enabling some of the key enterprise apps to bring in much needed transparency and efficiency within the businesses. Considering that mobility is emerging as the key priority for businesses, enterprises are also evaluating building enterprise apps store. Another area that has emerged as a top priority for CIO is implementing mobile-enabled enterprise-wide analytics apps in addition to reporting and dashboarding tools that enable business decision makers to take critical decisions just in time and while on the go. To get in-depth insights into key enterprise apps-related initiatives and innovations happening across different industry verticals, we caught up with five eminent Indian CIOs:  Umesh Mehta, Sr. VP & CIO - India at Jubilant Life Sciences; Ranjit Satyanath, CIO, Shoppers Stop; Vijay Sethi, VP – IS & HR & CIO, Hero MotoCorp;  S.S. Kukreja, EVP and Head (IT), IFFCO TOKIO General Insurance; and Meheriar Patel, CIO, USV Limited.

Jubilant Life Sciences is a global pharmaceutical and life sciences company with 10 world-class manufacturing facilities in India, the U.S. and Canada. The company has been leveraging enterprise apps in interesting ways to drive business. Mobile-enabling enterprise apps Umesh Mehta, Sr. VP & CIO - India at Jubilant Life Sciences shares that the company currently utilizes two CRM apps — both being cloud-based and mobile-enabled — one is used by the sales force which is engaged in B-to-B selling and the other is a local but niche CRM solution provided to medical representatives engaged in the B-to-C selling model. This enables the sales-person on the field to pull out requisite information quickly using the app. Apart from this, some key workflow apps and approval apps have been mobile-enabled. Mehta shares that apps are in place, which enables them to push and pull information from various enterprise apps — say for example ERP — and send weekly alerts in the form of SMS messages or e-mails to key stakeholders regarding sales data, collection data, outstanding alerts, stock-outs and more. This enables the key business decision makers to take decisions at the earliest. Strong focus on MDM The company is currently working on rethinking its IT strategy for the entire group. One of the key focus areas of the company under this, is building a robust Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution. “We are in the process of building a robust BYOD policy where we would be supporting all enterprise-class mobile devices. Currently, we are in the process of evaluating a slew of MDM solutions and in the coming three months we plan to implement an MDM solution,” says Mehta. Enterprise-wide reporting and dashboard solution in pipeline Another important focus area under the renewal of IT strategy is a strong focus on analytics solutions to bring tangible benefits to the business. “Of late the company has been utilizing QlikView for pulling out relevant business data. But going forward we are looking at implementing an enterprise-wide reporting and dashboard solution, which would enable Strategic Business Unit (SBU) heads to obtain business performance views on their fingertips; bring up KPI reports; provide quick customer-centric data regarding sales force spread across the globe and more,” shares Mehta.