Dheeraj Sinha,
Head – Corporate Management Services,
Apollo Tyres
 The global ambitions of Apollo Tyres are driven in no small measure by a robust and responsive IT. The company’s CIO Dheeraj Sinha, who has the inspiring designation of Head – Corporate Management Services, discusses the role he and his team play and some recent initiatives at the company with Sanjay Gupta, Senior Associate Editor, Network Computing. Excerpts:
Q. What is the strategic importance of IT to Apollo Tyres?
[It can be gauged from the fact that] The IT structure at Apollo Tyres reports to the Vice Chairman and Managing Director – IT doesn’t report in to Finance or Manufacturing or Marketing or any other department. The management is extremely conscious and aware that IT is the backbone for the success of any policy, process or quality initiative. So IT is one of the critical success factors for the organization and is not the territory of a single function or department. IT is completely aligned with Business and every single transaction that runs in the company runs on the systems.
Q. How does information exchange happen at the company?
There are two ways in which information flow happens in our company: if it’s around the transactions, it’s on SAP; and if it’s on workflow and process automation, then it’s on WebSphere. We have an extremely powerful intranet portal [on WebSphere], and anything that’s not available on SAP would probably be configured on our portal.
Q. You had deployed an SMS solution for your dealer network. How successful has it been?
Today, about 10,000 SMSes go to our dealers on a daily basis. Dealers are thrilled with our SMS initiative. In fact, if an SMS doesn’t go, my team members get calls as to why the information was not sent out. So there’s a huge pull from the dealers in terms of doing this. Besides, this tool gives our marketing and sales people to push campaigns and schemes to the dealers. Through the SMS the dealers can get alerts for what more they need to do to achieve their sales targets so that they become eligible for a particular scheme.
Q. How else is the SMS platform being used?
We’ve also extended the SMS functionality beyond the dealer network for things such as manufacturing alerts. Our sales staff can also pull availability of stock, prices, etc. through SMSes.
Q. Why has your RFID initiative not taken off to the extent your intended?
It is still in the conceptual stage because as we are yet to agree on certain parameters. We’ll soon have a senior management meeting with the RFID partner. We have been talking internally about RFID for quite some time, but you see, the tire is a very different product from other packaged goods that use RFID because it has to go through certain curing process with different temperature and pressure conditions. So it’s not easy to embed the tags into the product. We have to look at things like how the performance of the tire will be affected because the tag will be a foreign object in the tire. So we have to look at very specialized tags that can be used in tires and at specialist partners who have the capability to do that. Overall, RFID has to come in at a value that makes sense to us.
Q. How easy or difficult do you think it is to measure ROI for your IT initiatives?
Measuring of an IT project for ROI can be extremely complex or extremely simple. For projects like an intranet, there’s no tangible value attached to it. So there are a lot of projects that we take at the strategic level and we say, “For a scenario five or ten years down the line this is a must for the organization to have, irrespective.” And there are lots of projects that are short-term and are undertaken from an ROI perspective. We do a five year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculation for many projects. For instance, virtualization is relatively easy to calculate ROI on. You can look at things like the number of servers, the value of the maintenance contracts for those servers over a fixed period of time, their running cost, power, etc. We look at this cost spread over five years and say the PV (present value) today is such and such.
Q. What benefits did you have in mind when you started on virtualizing your Intel servers?
We were looking at simplifying the data center. We realized that there were too many servers and whenever we needed to roll out an application, we needed to deploy a server as well. Through virtualization, management of the servers will become much simpler and easier, with lower administration costs and faster rollout of applications.
Q. What is your management philosophy for nurturing and retaining your people?
[I believe that] People will stick around and still be happy if they get the learning they deserve. If the constant learning is not there, then the people will stagnate. There should be enough pressure for them to perform. You should not leave them “open” so they do not have clear objectives and do not know what to do. So you should have the ability to clearly communicate their KRAs and targets and give them enough space and opportunity to learn along with meeting their goals.
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