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Suresh Shenoy, Wockhardt Pharma

The key business processes that have been automated in Wockhardt's pharma division include sales force automation, export consignment document transmittal, production planning and control, payment processing and management information. The benefits accrued have been myriad-faster responses from field force leading to improvement in customer focus, paperless communication and decision making process, based on employee dashboard.

With India continuing to remain at the heart of Wockhardt's global operations, contributing 43% of its revenues, the company has a sizeable presence in the domestic market through its 1300-strong field force, which services more than 150,000 medical practitioners and 100,000 retail pharmacists across the country. The major IT achievement during the year was the development of the sales force automation tool "Infinity", an in-house software that facilitates online tracking of customer response and sales activities.

Wockhardt's IT-enabled supply chain team played a pivotal role in the integration of CP Pharmaceuticals with Wockhardt in critical areas like procurement, inventory and logistics management. The supply chain team launched a "common invoice" for all divisions during the year, facilitating quicker and better decisions and enabling faster collections. An innovative "vendor finance scheme" was successfully flagged off. The company also rationalized its C&FA management and improved its debtor and credit control system. Conversion of its Oracle Tier 2 ERP to Tier 3 is also in progress.

Incidentally, Wockhardt has outsourced the development of contract manufacturing applications and its WAN management to third-party service providers. The WAN connectivity covering factories and depots through Lotus Notes and Oracle replication and dedicated Internet access have ensured Web presence for Wochardt. On the other hand, it has involved Ness Technologies to install, configure, customize, host and support its US-based financial IT infrastructure, including all financial modules, electronic data interchange, and interfaces to Wockhardt Pharmaceuticals' contract and procurement management systems.

Wockhardt has been one of the pioneers in embracing open source in India with an aim to ensure easy manageability and procuring a low cost solution with high reliability. Linux was selected as the platform to host Oracle 9i database to run mission critical applications. The aim was to attain the reliability of Unix at a lower cost. The hardware platform selected was HP Proliant servers with redundancy built in for storage, memory and CPU. The performance of the existing database was not up to the mark for user end response and the cost of maintaining the Unix machine was also quite high. With Linux, Wockhardt has improved the performance 30-fold and manageability cost is also quite low. 

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