What’s in store for 2010 at Tata Power?

There are a lot of initiatives for 2010. SAP is our backbone and accordingly our organization is SAP-centric. Now we are building up a document management system that is marked for 2010. In addition, there would be storage-related initiatives. We are also on the way to become IFRS (International Finance Reporting System) compliant.

Tata Power is an integrated power company covering areas from generation, through transmission to distribution. Hence a cohesive reporting system is a focus area. Accordingly modifications would be done, though it’s a long exercise.

What’s the role of technology in contributing to larger energy efficiency goals?

We call this side of work as sustainability area and lot of subjects are linked to it. There is the smart-grid concept which is just entering Indian market. Then areas like proper load balancing, AMR (Automated Meter Reading) and automation of entire processes along with integration with SAP have their space too. In our case proof-of-concept stage is on.

In the utility industry, how much automation has happened so far?

Many utility companies are doing efforts in this area but not as aggressively as we do. We are going for best practices in this space. We are also working on digitizing land related records, drawing and land models related to our land bank in a central repository.