'Need to speak more of biz and less of IT'

Tell us about the projects undertaken?



Several projects have been undertaken in the last one and half year. The first

one was in-house developed field force productivity and effectiveness solution. The first version went live across country in February 2003 in phases. Some
Pakistani companies later on adopted this solution. 





We are still selling this application in countries like New Zealand. BI solution was the other one we deployed on management dashboard for the entire organization. Then there was talent planning system developed in-house which is being used by around 30 Pfizer countries excluding US and Europe.





What about the IT Roadmap?



We are in the process of deploying sales field portal that will give significant boost to the working culture in sales. Secondly, we providing our sales team a Reliance phone for data conversion. The server for that has already been hosted at Reliance data center. The reason for doing such an exercise is to lower the expenses. Also several applications that will be used as Intranet are under development. We spent around Rs 5 crore last year on various IT initiatives and this year we will spend much more than that.






What are the challenges ahead?



Pharma industry is already facing lot of challenges. First is pricing pressure driven by regulation, enhancing field force productivity, handling an increasing number of drugs and the most important is that traditionally Pharma has been conservative in adopting change. Therefore Business Technology (BT) comprises business skills more than technical. 






Here budgets are owned by business and not IT. We generally budget for what we spend and operational sustenance of infrastructure. The focus is more on strategic imperatives and outsource operational.





Is IT different from any other function in Pharma industry?



We need to understand IT as four business like functions. The typical business function comprises components like strategy and planning, product development and marketing, manufacturing, operations and distribution and customer service. On the same lines there are IT components that include strategy and planning, application development that include plan, design and production, operations and help desk. Therefore, it is imperative to create a perception of fair comparison to create buy-in with various functions.






Which upcoming technology areas do you consider ripe for adoption in your company?



There are upcoming technologies that we are looking to deploy provided it adds value to the business like infrastructure management and development. Other is wireless networking, unified storage if need permits.







What about customer-vendor relationship?






Vendor reliability is very important and we prefer choosing from the top three.