Companies are adopting technologies to meet business and customer needs

Whether it is banking, the automotive industry or manufacturing generally, Indian enterprises have leapfrogged even their global rivals in the adoption of technologies.

Coming to an airport near you: A robot called Rada who will scan boarding passes, provide information on the terminal — including where to get coffee, departure gates, real-time flight status and the weather conditions in your destination city. If you are travelling solo and are bored, Rada can play games with you.

The robot belongs to the airline Vistara, and it will free up valuable time of employees by taking on routine processes, allowing staff to focus on more meaningful contact with travellers, said Ravinder Pal Singh, Vistara’s chief information and innovation officer. Powered by artificial intelligence and indigenously developed, Rada will soon be greeting unsuspecting travellers in the airline’s lounge at Delhi’s Terminal 3.

Once you arrive at your destination, the hotel has probably introduced a digital check-in with no need to fill out forms at reception. Your smartphone will function as your room key. At the Hilton Conrad hotel in Bengaluru, guests can select the room they want based on interactive floor plans and Google maps API. Across India, the landscape of how people live, work, travel and consume is changing. The adoption of data analytics, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT), among others, is transforming the way goods are made and services rendered. In the past, Indian companies adopted some of the best practices of the west in order to have a competitive edge. Those days are over. They have developed their own homegrown digital platforms and initiatives organically, for their specific needs. 

“Today, what with Aadhaar, banking and financial inclusion and with the spread of smartphones and 4G, India is possibly at the cutting edge technologically,” said Debdeep Sengupta, president and managing director of SAP India. 

Whether it is banking, the automotive industry, the hospitality sector, or manufacturing generally, Indian enterprises have leapfrogged even their global rivals in the adoption of technologies.

Debdeep Sengupta President and Managing Director, SAP India

“There are two great things happening in India. The first one is that this India is the disruption centre of the universe. Sectors, technologies and markets are changing at such a fast pace and when you add the scale factor to that, then it creates huge disruption. Given this, you don’t come to any Indian client and talk about the mild advantages of digitisation. They pretty much know what they are and what they want to be,” said Harriet Green, chairman and managing director of IBM Asia Pacific.

Consider the telecom sector. It is bleeding. Voice, once its traditional bread and butter, is nearly free. Data, once regarded as the only saviour around, is being offered at throwaway prices owing to the emergence of Jio. The only way service providers can make money is by finding innovative ways of monetising their services.

Imagine a corporate customer, or even an individual user, who is experiencing call drops or network issues. During one such incident, the customer gets a call from the telecom service provider who instantly offers 50 GB of data free, to compensate for the bad network experience. Called “real-time offer management”, this tactic wins the customer’s trust and companies have started providing it.

Ravinder Pal Singh, Chief information and innovation officer Vistara

Or imagine this: A situation where the telco acts swiftly and pre-emptively to fix maintenance issues at a tower, based on an analysis of data sourced from customer complaints in the area to detect a pattern, before the network goes down completely.

“The telco industry in India, which was once considered a poster child, has lost this tag today for a variety of reasons. But it has emerged as perhaps one of the most innovative industries in the world today, because of this disruption that is happening,” said Sengupta.

At the offices of specialised glass manufacturer Piramal Glass, CEO Vijay Shah realised that, despite an already high degree of automation across its factories, the company was still losing valuable efficiency due to a number of paper-based processes. The company leveraged the IoT to get real-time visibility into its line manufacturing operations.

Using Microsoft’s Azure IoT Hub helped Piramal Glass acquire data from sensors located on the production lines to identify real-time losses at each stage and gain insights on efficiencies at 46 production lines staffed by 3,500 people at four plants in Gujarat and one each in Sri Lanka and the US.

Vijay Shah, CEO, Piramal Glass

After analysing the data, the company improved production efficiency. It also slashed costs by up to 70 per cent, compared to the glass industry’s manufacturing norms. "While in the normal glass industry, up to 10 per cent rejections are possible, specialised glass manufacturers witness up to 25 per cent rejections due to multiple factors like temperature of the raw material or the variable nature of ingredients. With real-time feedback through various IoT devices on the floor, the paper-based feedback loop that would take a few hours in the past and resulted in multiple rejected products could be reduced to a bare minimum," said Shah.

IT players, both Indian and global, have been talking about their “digital revenues” and shift towards automation, the cloud, and the IoT. A major part of this includes solutions for the manufacturing sector, ranging from demand forecasting and equipment monitoring to fleet and logistics management and predicting breakdowns in devices, all of which are monitored through IoT monitoring. The idea is to give B2B customers a B2C experience where they can monitor every step of their product as it moves down the production line.

Some of the most creative innovations are emerging in the automotive sector which has been at the forefront of adopting some of the new generation technologies here and abroad. Thanks to the local subsidiaries of multinationals bringing sophisticated technologies here from their parent companies, the shop floors of these auto companies not only became automated almost a decade ago but are now gearing up for artificial intelligence and the IoT.

The entire production process on Hyundai Motor India’s shop floor, for example, rests on an inter-operable system which allows devices, sensors and people to be connected and communicate with one another in real-time.

This is a perfect illustration of the philosophy of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), defined as “connect process, data and people using the right technology at the right place to transform manufacturing operations”, according to S Ganesh Mani, senior vice president, production, at Hyundai. Technologies such as smart sensors, 3-D printing, augmented reality, and virtual reality-based training tools are used to create this new age reality.

To tap into the opportunities which data science and analytics offer, Hyundai captures 1.2 billion data points per year across all its manufacturing processes. These data points are analysed to gain insights to fine-tune its operational parameters, including predictive and preventive maintenance. These, in turn, have helped to remove the bottlenecks around daily manufacturing operations and prevent line stoppages.  

To tackle breakdowns and down time, Hyundai uses an “auto-analyser” tool in-house for analysing the “alarm data” of all its connected machines. It helps to isolate the problem and find a quick solution, in real-time. The company has developed all the tools in-house without any external support, said Mani. Later this year, it plans to introduce around 150 plug and play smart sensors which will help extract data from legacy machines for even deeper insights that can enhance predictive maintenance even further.

At Tata Motors, the focus is moving to providing an enhanced experience to customers. Eager to cater to the changing buyer profile, it is renovating its showrooms to give them a new corporate identity and make the customer interface more digital. Tata Motors will deploy Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality at its showrooms, during road shows, and also at public places with high footfalls such as shopping malls, said S N Barman, vice president, sales and marketing, Tata Motors.

The hope is that these changes will resonate with younger buyers who are tech savvy, well-read, and well-travelled and would prefer not to have a pesky sales rep hanging around. With the launch of the newer models, including the Nexon and Tigor, showrooms are now using “imaginators” or digital tools that allow buyers to customise the car with their choice of colours, accessories, and upholstery. Encouraged by the response, Tata Motors plans to roll out imaginators in its newly renovated showrooms.  

Not to be left behind is the hospitality sector, where it is imperative to keep improving the guest experience. The Hilton, the InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) and Four Seasons are some of the companies that have recently introduced digital check-ins at a few of their properties, rendering the reception check-in redundant and allowing guests to use their smartphones as a room key. 

The Hilton is also piloting a feature called Connected Room — a personalised, mobile-first room experience. “This will empower them to tailor all elements of their stay from the palms of their hands, starting from streaming of their favourite television channels and controlling room temperature and light settings to ordering extra pillows and towels. We are now testing the Connected Room beta technology in a handful of hotel rooms and will launch this first in the US, then in the rest of the world,” said a Hilton spokesperson.

The IHG is also bringing these new features to India. “In the future, you will be able to check in online like you do with airlines, check out online, and select a particular room online. It opens a new world of technology. You just take the key...or it may be it will be sent to your mobile. It is definitely the future,” said Pascal Gauvin, managing director, India, Middle East and Africa at IHG.

In a similar vein, Four Seasons has rolled out a digital service called “Four Seasons Chat” which enables guests to send and receive instant messages with property teams before, throughout, and after their stay. This feature is now available at the Four Seasons in Mumbai and will feature in their forthcoming property in Bengaluru.

Finally, the financial services sector, which is facing heavy disruption, wants a seat at the table, too. According to research and analyst firm Gartner, 80 per cent of heritage financial services firms will go out of business or exist only formally (but not competing effectively) by 2030. These firms will struggle to justify their relevance, as global digital platforms, fintech companies and other non-traditional players gain greater market share, using technology to change the economics and business models of the industry.

As it is, digital lending start-ups are already scoring not just over traditional banks but also non-banking financial companies, winning millennials over to their network quite early. The trend is expected to grow in the coming months.  

This much is clear. After spending a few years trying to digitise and cosmetically improve customer experience only on the B2C-end or front-end, Indian businesses are now adopting smart tech solutions in their actual business processes to use digitisation to drive real-time efficiency, and consequently, better business decisions.