Getting rolling with the big idea
Loading ...
Pune-based Persistent Systems has won a NASSCOM award for innovation, stemming from a project they delivered for their client – tyre major Bridgestone. The Emerge newsletter team visits with Persistent to find out why this engagement is now being held up as a shinning example of innovation the world over.
It was a moment of truth for 34 year old Siddhesh Bhobe, an Associate Vice President at Pune-based Persistent Systems, as he watched the burly Belgian Bridgestone dealer casually use the metal tool in his hand to enter data into the PDA device running the software program that Persistent was piloting. Siddhesh was then in Brussels, testing out the new PDA-based software application that his company had built for client Bridgestone to support the latter’s innovative “tyre as a service” business model that the tyre giant was trying to roll out across Europe.
“We realized that these dealers were never going to use a stylus on the PDA and would just instead reach for what ever was at hand – most likely a tool. We knew then that the device had to be pretty rugged.” It’s a lesson that Siddhesh and his team applied right through the project and which guided everything from software user interfaces to the bright colours on the device. “It’s the sort of thing that would never fit on a corporate desk. But out there in the snow, rain, sleet and dark days, something like this has to stand out.”
Standing out there, speaking to his customer’s customer taught Siddhesh and team a lot more than just dry functional requirements would have. These site visits also reflect the kind of partnership that Persistent brought to the table to help its customer roll out a business model that is being held up as a shinning example of innovation by legendary management gurus such as CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan. “It all started when Bridgestone came to us and said, “Look, we have this business model, where we want to start charging our customers not the acquisition cost of a tyre, but a usage fee based on distance travelled and stress on tyre. How do we make it happen?” Persistent knew that they would have to create a mobile application that automated the model, but how? So, they put together a team that went out and mapped exactly where and how the application would be used.
With its tyre-as-a-service business model, where customers are charged by usage as well as tyre wear and tear, Bridgestone required its dealers and service engineers to undertake inspections of tyres on vehicles at various outdoor locations, often in difficult working conditions. Data needed to be obtained regularly from thousands of vehicles across numerous fleets. With millions of data points to be captured, often in terrible working conditions, paper capture just wasn’t working out. Teams on the field had to make sure that they were only capturing data from vehicles covered by the service contract, which was often not the case. Missing and incorrect data was already costing the company in high operational cost and revenue outages.
Persistent quickly realized that, in order for the service model to succeed, Bridgestone needed an effective data capture mechanism that would reduce data errors during inspections. Such a system would also have to feed the data collected in real time into a centralized application that would make program management much more simpler for its client.
The team then went back to the drawing board to create, in a matter of 4 weeks, a pilot application running on a handheld device that service engineers could use right from the inspection site. “It’s critical to go to the end-users quickly and use the first release as a beta for feedback,” says Siddhesh. Indeed, based on such end user feedback, innovations such as a virtual numeric keypad were incorporated, as were sound cues optimized to the end user profile.
The handheld device application was also engineered in such a way that network connectivity was not required during actual data capture – this freed the engineer from the need to have continuous, uninterrupted network connectivity. End-user optimization was also done by localizing the application for all major European Languages. Today the application has being deployed at approximately 2,000 dealers across more than 15 European countries – all integrated seamlessly with Bridgestone’s centralized ERP and CRM applications in Brussels. The deployment has improved productivity by 800% at Bridgestone as manual data capture errors have dropped. Service engineers are now also able to access customer data on the field, enabling them to respond quickly and efficiently on the spot, thereby improving decision making and time-to-revenue.
So, what was Persistent’s value-add? “I think it was in our 360° solution approach and the fact that we took end-to-end solution responsibility,” says Siddhesh. Persistent has also been seeing more of such projects. “Ten years ago, we were only working with (client) IT development teams to write software. In the last one decade this has changed, and we are interacting more with frontline people in customer teams as well as their customers. Now we actually get a chance to see real people using our applications in real-life situations. It also makes the project that more interesting and fulfilling,” he says.
Fundamentally Persistent’s work has changed the vendor-client relationship to one where the software development vendor is an extension of Bridgestone’s engineering’s team. “It has proved that innovation is possible through a partner sitting tens of thousands of miles away. And this project has also changed our concepts of sales and selling – from selling tyres as products to selling them as a service” says Siddhesh.
Any spin-offs from the Bridgestone project? Apart from all the high profile branding and book mentions, it has encouraged the company to pitch more aggressively for such end-to-end, full service, customer facing projects. At a lesser level, it has also deepened the company’s expertise in mobile and field force automation solutions.
What was the catalyst that enabled Persistent innovate so effectively for its customer? Siddhesh says that the culture at Persistent has been one that encourages ideation. “People are encouraged to think and not just to write code. They are given time during the work schedule to pursue an idea and take it forward. That’s the spirit we applied to the Bridgestone project – in fact a big part of the way the application finally turned, stemmed from ideas that we gave them, and not from the requirements that originally came.”
In Persistent’s case their innovation stemmed from not altering or modifying their business model but by empowering their customer to change his. Taking ownership of that change was clearly the big catalyst here that put Persistent – and its customer –on a roll – quite literally!
Contributed by Anita Mani, Prayag Consulting, for the NASSCOM EMERGE newsletter.
Related posts
- An Idea can change the fortunes of your company We are living in times where enterprises and entrepreneurs are...
- Winners of NASSCOM ‘INNOVATION AWARDS 2008’ announced From the 24 companies shortlisted, 8 winners will be recognized...
- More Innovations around our needs..Part II The very alert organizers ensure we are all inside the...
- Made in India: Featuring Mooga from Iken Solutions The section features emerging player Iken Solutions, whose flagship product...
- Made in India: Featuring TrueKM from Lpcube TrueKM is a Knowledge Management (KM) product from Chennai-based...
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment