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Giving freedom or an encouraging environment to his team members, right from
expressing themselves to taking up challenging tasks, Chandan Sinha, CIO of GHCL
(or Gujarat Heavy Chemicals as it was earlier known), is guided by a belief that
the essence of a good leader is his belief in his team members and trust in his
people.
Though he feels it is necessary to be one step ahead of his team, at the same
time, he ensures that he leads by example; open to learning from his team
members and not just be a leader.
At GHCL, Sinha plays many roles to perfection, right from advising the
management on IT-related issues to planning and executing projects. One of the
best qualities of Sinha is his ability to grasp concepts end-to-end, thereby
providing efficiency. At GHCL, he wears many hats, for instance, in the soda ash
department, IT is responsible for nimbleness wherein any stock lying in store
spells losses; here he is responsible for linking up all the essential elements
(vendors, distributors, customers etc) to optimize the raw material usage. In
the textile segment, he becomes the communicator for enabling communication
between all parties involved. And lastly, for our greenfield retail project, he
has been the thought leader wherein he is responsible for putting all the best
processes in place, says Nikhil Sen, director, Rosebys Interiors, a unit of
GHCL and a close associate of Sinha. There could not have been a more apt sum up
of Sinhas profile and how he juggles various roles with relative ease.
Journey so Far
With a background in commerce, Sinha initially started his career as an
accounts executive in an engineering company, where he worked for five years. It
is while working here that Sinha was exposed to computers and got an opportunity
to automate the systems. This led him to pursue various programming languages
from NIIT. He finally decided to make a career out of IT and took the plunge
when he got an assignment of selling computer courses at ICS. However, I soon
realized that marketing and selling was not my cup of tea, and within a year I
came back to Delhi and joined Escorts Tractors as a programmer. Thereafter my
journey has been in becoming a senior programmer, application head, ERP core
team member, ERP project leader, IT consultant and finally a CIO, he says.
During his journey of becoming a CIO, Sinha worked in various capacities at
several organizations namely Honda Siel, Sahara India and GHCL.
Sinha owes a lot to his mentor and a senior in Escorts, JS Bansal, who
encouraged him to do what was right and made him realize the significance of
good planning and man management. It is thanks to his rigorous, on-the-job
training and his belief in me that has made me the person I am today. He taught
me to trust people because trust in your team members encourages them to do
their best, which leads to success, he adds.
Life at GHCL
GHCL India, commissioned in March 1988, has evolved over the years as a global
chemical and textile company. The company is quite active on the IT front. Sinha
believes that his journey until now has been quite satisfying especially in his
current assignment at GHCL, where his IT team has successfully implemented ERP,
B2B and B2C in various business verticals like chemicals, textiles and retail.
One of the most important projects which we have implemented until date is
the online Enterprise Information Portal, primarily for facilitating information
availability to all major functions and employees. The registered users can
access this information from anywhere by using only an Internet connection. The
concept behind this was to pull information as-and-when required, instead of
pushing information at regular intervals over email, which, more often than not,
is ignored by the employees. The enterprise information portal has resulted in
freeing costly resources and cost reduction, he adds. He was instrumental in
implementing the Internet-based HRIS and Performance Management System for all
executives.
But Sinha counts the rolling out of the B2C e-commerce portal for GHCLs
Rosebys business as the most challenging project implemented till date.
Rosebys has been in existence since 1922, as the number one retailer for home
textile products in the UK. After acquiring it, in 2006, our immediate target
was to increase sales in its chain of over 300 stores. An option was to explore
and harness the capabilities of the Internet. At that point we decided to
convert the static Rosebys website into a full-fledged B2C e-portal. The
implementation was done in a short span of only eight months, right from the
conceptualization stage to rollout. Ever since its launch in August 2007, the
portal has clicked sales every single day, which has led to the increase in the
overall sales. Though all IT projects implemented at GHCL are important to the
business, the successful implementation of the e-portal helped changing the view
about IT in the organization, from a service function to a business enhancer,
he says.
Talent Crunch?
Ask him about facing issues related to non-availability of qualified people
for hiring and Sinha draws a blank. Even though it may seem strange to many of
my fellow CIOs and others in the industry, I have never faced any talent crunch.
This could be because I do not expect new recruits to know 100%; even if the
candidate knows 60%, the rest can be done by providing training and hands on
experience. He further adds that once you have invested in an employee, it is
imperative to provide an atmosphere to encourage him. Once you win his
confidence, he becomes an asset. Sinha goes on to produce numbers to further
back up his claims saying, Since I joined, in 2005, the attrition rate has been
a measly 10%, with most key people still there.
Stuti Das
stutid@cybermedia.co.in
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