Whirlpool: 'We are still in the early stages of convergence journey'

How mission-critical is IT infrastructure to your organization?

IT infrastructure is the backbone for our corporation and it is extremely
important for 24/7 availability of the same. As we have a shared landscape for
our entire corporation, the uptime of our infrastructure becomes even more
critical. We have our Global Datacenter in US and all the countries operate
using that infrastructure.

What security standards do you follow?

As part of the Sarbanes Oxley regulations every country is audited annually
to ensure adherence to our global standards. For us Network Security is one of
the key risk factor that we address with a very strict global guideline.

How do you align business with IT?

These days every business initiative has an IT dependency in terms of
information, infrastructure and ability to provide a differentiating capability
in the market place. So, in all our IT initiatives we identify the business
benefits and document them before we start our activities. In fact, there is an
audit function that does a postmortem of IT initiatives by inviting business and
IS owners, and validating if the documented business benefits are realized. This
helps us understand what we are doing right and where we need to improve.

What approach do you follow in outsourcing?

Outsourcing is a key strategic move whirlpool has undertaken for a while.
The key reason is to free up the internal IS resources and leave the day to day
maintenance to key partners who specialize in those services and are able to
leverage because of the size of their operations.

ERP implementations are important for any manufacturing and
retail company. What matters the most to you in such implementations?

In today's world integration across various functions within the company
is more or less taken for granted-thanks to ERP applications. That leaves us
with a need to clearly look for process improvements and close functionality
gaps in certain areas of our functions. We do use the powerful backend of these
ERP applications to provide enhanced functionalities.

How do you ensure that all IT and telecom investments are linked
to business goals such as better financials?

As the technology keeps improving year over year, the cost for some of these
services also keeps dropping. So we try not to lock ourselves into multi year
deals and keep the door open for better pricing. At the same time, we do not
compromise on the global standards that are to be maintained in these
investments for lower cost.

Now that convergence is taking place in ICT, how important would
it be for the FMCG/retail sector?

We are still in the early stages of convergence journey. But as we get more
and more players in this space, it will only help our sector where the
dependence of various modes of communication is important, and doing it at a
lower cost is even more important.

Which technology is going to be the key driver in the FMCG/retail
industry in coming days?

RFID is an opportunity area even though it is still a bit more expensive. The
other key area would be supply chain optimization, which really can help
organizations become more efficient in delivering the right product at the right
time at the right place.

What has been your experience in terms of services delivered by
the service provider?

Everyone has their own agenda and obviously a constant review of the
services, agreements, and feedback becomes important to ensure service is
adequate.

Baburajan K


baburajank@cybermedia.co.in