Vijay Sethi,
Vice President – Information Systems,
Hero Honda
 At a time when the automotive sector is facing tough challenges of growth, Vijay Sethi, Vice President – Information Systems, Hero Honda, who joined the company about seven months back, has his job cut out. A firm believer in the power of technology driving business, Sethi talks to Sanjay Gupta about his style and substance.
Career progression: A mechanical engineer by education, Sethi did his Post Graduation from NITIE (National Institute of Industrial Engineering), Mumbai. He has also completed a course in supply chain management and holds an MBA as well. He started his career with TCS in 1989 and gained strategic insights into the software consulting business. His big moment came in 1996 at Ranbaxy where he initiated and saw through a massive implementation of SAP’s ERP solution. He left Ranbaxy in 2007 as director of business solutions responsible for IT across various geographies.
Current responsibilities: Sethi has joined the automobile industry at a time when it was not growing the way it should or the way it was growing earlier. The year 2007-08 was a year when the industry saw negative growth after so many years. “But at Hero Honda we didn’t lose any market share even though the growth was flat. With this kind of background, we wanted to give a fillip to IT to get that extra efficiency and improve productivity,” he says. And that’s the role he has been assigned to.
What business wants him to do: Improve efficiency and effectiveness, reduce cost using IT, and strategize on how IT can prepare the company for the future. According to him, IT follows the same philosophy espoused by MD Pawan Munjal: Tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
On key initiatives: There are a lot of initiatives Hero Honda is taking across the board – from marketing and finance to R&D and technology. One of the IT initiatives the company just started is product lifecycle management (PLM), where it plans to take care of a product right from its inception till its maturity – cradle to grave, so to speak. This involves researching the product to creating the drawings to designing and managing design changes through to sourcing the components. “The need for a PLM system arose because previously, we were using a manual system and we wanted to reduce our cost as well as time to development,” says Sethi. Besides, the company has built several applications on top of its integrated suite of SAP business solutions that include ERP, SRM, CRM and Business Warehousing.
Comparing the change from pharma to automobile: Being different industries the challenges, too, are different, says Sethi. But he really didn’t take long “to gel into the system” here at Hero Honda because of the culture of the organization. According to him, people are open to change from an IT perspective and the pull at the operational level is huge. Besides, there’s tremendous support from the management.
The question of in-house versus outsource: Most of the company’s IT initiatives, especially core activities, are done in-house though it does outsource routine things like maintenance of systems and servers. The company also uses consulting resources whenever required. “Basically, we try and keep a healthy blend of in-house and outsourced resources,” says Sethi.
Big challenge ahead: According to Sethi, the biggest challenge that the automotive sector is facing today is growth. And he personally believes that when the times are tough, then IT can really help a lot.
Personal mantra at workplace: “I try to practice what I preach; I would rather tell my people how to do it rather than just give them theoretical gyan,” he says. “In my interaction with other CIOs, one thing stands out that we need to lead by example and, very important, win the trust of the users.”
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