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Nicholas Piramal has primarily grown as a company through acquisitions. As the CIO, how do you cope up with the different systems/softwares being used and how challenging is the process after a new acquisition?
It is always a challenge to manage IT for acquired companies. We have a landscape which we have implemented for Nicolas Piramal ie SAP for ERP, and it is on an IBM AIX Oracle platform. If the acquired company has SAP, then all the intermediate support which is local to that company is taken over by our IT team in India. The benefit is immediate as local support costs much more compared to support from India. The servers we bring to India also reduce the cost of managing the infrastructure for SAP. Within three months of our UK acquisition, we brought the server to India and provided support from here. Now, we have a complete data center which houses all SAP servers and the entire infrastructure for all our group companies. As far as messaging systems are concerned, Lotus Notes is first to be implemented across all the companies in UK, Canada etc. We have a landscape where every acquisition is added within a specified period. By such standardization, we can leverage our skill sets and infrastructure.

You have offices in India and several other countries abroad. How are these offices connected to each other?
MPLS lines connect all our offices which then becomes our intranet. In India and Sri Lanka we have Tata Indicom, which is the primary service provider. For remote locations, Reliance is our service provider. In the UK, we have chosen British Telecom and in the US and Canada we have a tie up with Sprint.

How do you intend to use technology to become #1 pharma company in India?
Our strategy is to grow by acquisition. Providing IT support for our acquired companies and bringing the cost down is our biggest challenge. Once a company is acquired, the transition time is very small. Within that specified time we have to take control of all the IT assets and IT support. Sometimes acquisition is quick and we have to keep pace. As we expand, there is also a need to bring all acquisitions into the same standardization. The first benefit in an acquisition which is easily visible is the IT benefit. In case of an overseas acquisition, the moment IT support is taken over by our team in India; there is drastic cost reduction. Moreover, standardization reduces workforce, service cost and maintenance cost which in turn benefits the company. Based on our past experiences, we are geared to meet the challenge.

Data security and storage is a major issue for pharma companies. What steps have you taken in this regard?
In Pharma companies we must have a secure intranet so that invaluable data is protected. Firstly, none of our servers is connected to theInternet. Data available on the Internet is a separate network not linked with our internal network. This is a major step to prevent loss of data. For all our mission-critical systems we have a disaster recovery services (DRS) in place where all our data is replicated. We also have what is called as business continuity-a built in mechanism, which ensure that in case of any emergency, business will resume within 4 to 6 hours without loss of information. Another step we have taken to prevent pilferage of data in sensitive areas such as R&D is to deny access to floppy drives, CD drives or USB ports.

What are the technologies that you plan to deploy in future, and the challenges that you foresee in managing the IT infrastructure?
Our blueprint for systems is already in place and we intend to expand on this blueprint. In any pharmaceutical acquisition, we will implement the standard packages such as SAP, Lotus Notes etc. Tools such as Tivoli from IBM enables us to manage our infrastructure, operations and IT processes better as well as effectively deliver services aligned to our business goals. As we increase our acquisitions across the globe, the challenge of managing data centers, networks and security systems in far flung areas arise. We require tools which would help manage remotely. We are looking at acquiring those tools so that we are fully equipped at managing the IT administration and can match the speed of our business.

What are the SLAs for national and international connectivity?
SLAs, in terms of any connectivity, are availability of services. Anything less than 98 is not acceptable. Sometimes, we may have to drop it down to 95 for some remote sites. But in major cities we cannot have less than 98.

You had plans on field force automation where PDAs were supposed to be given to field people. What is its current status?
We have a field force system and we have an e-business suite from Oracle. PDAs have been given to about 400 people in India. But with a field force of nearly 3,000 people, it is not possible to give PDAs to everyone. So we have developed a system of mix and match where some people have PDAs and others web-based solutions. In remote areas, for instance, field people use web based solutions and information available on SAP is made available to them too.

What role does technology play in R&D?
As far as general R&D activities are concerned, we have implemented Sapphire wherein we capture research and development work, laboratory information and tests conducted into a big knowledge base. We have systems in place where all the information is collected, stored and made accessible to the right people.

Ratnadeep Gupta
ratnadeepg@cybermedia.co.in