Tata Teleservices is one of the leading telecommunications service providers of India offering mobile, fixed line, broadband and corporate communications services across the country. Among the first private telecom company to start operations in the country after deregulation, Tata Teleservices operates in 20 circles. Having pioneered the CDMA 3G1x technology platform in India, Tata Teleservices has established a robust and reliable telecom infrastructure that ensures quality in its services. IT is today the market leader in the fixed wireless telephony market with a total customer base of over 3.8 million.

Tata Teleservices (TTSL) is in a very dynamic market environment that is currently witnessing rapid changes in customer behaviour in a very competitive market. "As a service provider, our key challenges include the spiralling down of the telecom tariffs thereby benefiting the end consumer with an extremely huge challenge of managing and effectively bringing down costs," says Navin Chadha, CIO, Tata Teleservices. He also adds that in addition to that customer retention by providing timely and effective service has been a key challenge. "TTSL aims to achieve its numbers and grow by targeting specific customer niches through its Strategic Business Units and focus on both numbers and revenues through the same," Chadha observes.

In such a business environment TTSL needed a strong robust application which would cater to circle/State specific requirements and parallelly offer ease of consolidation at the corporate level. "We also wanted high degree of controls – with low or minimized risk of users performing/corrupting data during various points of data entry. Moreover, there was also a need for a complete monitoring and control system of the spend plan – for the large amounts of Capex investments planned during the roll out of the new circles to ensure adherence to budgets," points out Chadha. The operator also wanted an end to end tracking of inventory for both Capex and Opex items and manage the same effectively, accounting and tracking of fixed assets, automated updation and little or no need to run programs to run updates for consolidated and updated reports/balances, and accounting and management of payables and receivables.

In order to meet the abovementioned challenges, TTSL implemented mySAP ERP (Version: Enterprise Edition 4.7). 12 TTSL circles have gone live directly on SAP.

According to Chadha, SAP at TTSL today delivers Capex monitoring by ensuring procurements do not exceed the budgeted Capex, Opex monitoring by delivering reporting on budget vs. actual, inventory monitoring of products on a pan India basis, proper accounting and tracking of fixed assets, tracking of cell site wise expenditure via Real Estate Management, tracking key customer equipment serial number wise, reporting on key parameters. "Usage of SAP is spread across all locations and at all levels – including third party service providers – performing data entry – thereby defining the base on which management reporting can be drawn," informs Chadha.

According to Chadha, SAP's strengths in being an integrated enterprise solution vendor helped finalizing the vendor. "TTSL had SAP earlier and it was a case of getting back to SAP as the functionalities from its competition did not meet our requirements," he points out. Stating that TTSL's overall experience with SAP has been good, Chadha observes that some of the areas of improvement include management of high volumes of serial number based Customer Premises Equipment Management and interface of applications like Intec with SAP and automated Invoicing in SAP. Chadha also feels that SAP can do better by including support for Indian Tax related issues.

Team DQ
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

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