INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH MR. MADHAVA M S RAO
Chief Information Officer
Lulu Group International
What are the top technology trends shaping finance processes?
Technological changes in the Financial processes domain is playing a key role in transforming businesses today.
Top trends include implementing innovative technologies like distributed hyper ledger, block chain and acceptance of agile private cloud applications.
Security and Governance, and Digital transformation all along with the integration to the backend ERP systems in Real time.
In what ways, do you believe that operational innovation can transform an enterprise? could you elaborate with few examples.
I believe that Digital Transformation is the key in bringing in an end to end transparency at every level of decision making, so that all LOB’s are completely aware of all the key decisions made across all verticals ( Departments) in the organization.
We can give various examples like
a. The Recent GST Implementation in India or the VAT implementation across the GCC countries where all the departments of the organization are impacted in terms of compliance and innovation across operations and technology is key in delivering such transformational projects .
b. Lulu Group today being a major retail company, Omnichannel Strategy and presence across all our channels is a key innovation which improves the customer engagement and satisfaction.
What are some of the key technologies that can significantly improve operational efficiency?
Businesses today are seeking ways to adopt the change of consumer preferences in a flexible and robust manner. So, it becomes imperative that you need to implement and deliver working solutions in the shortest possible time. Some of the key technologies that will help in improving operational efficiency is by investing in Automation, Enterprise mobility, Standardization of applications and interfaces, Big Data and IOT.
What are the next trends in shared services and how in your view are enterprises adopting it ?
Research suggests that shared services organization can streamline processes by adopting automation, virtualization, advanced analytics to improve decision making and the quality of internal and external customer interactions.
Lulu is looking at digitizing the backoffice function to increase and realize significant savings in terms of costs and operational efficiencies.
Can you detail some of the innovations that your group has done with technology and how it has impacted your performance?
Innovations at the group level include
- Adopting in memory technology ahead of peers by implementing SAP HANA across ERP, Analytics and Integration platforms bringing in real time visibility across Key operation metrics.
- Implemented Fujitsu FlexFrame Orchestrator to virtualize all SAP Instances in the Landscapes creating a high availability solutions with significant infrastructure savings and flexibility supporting the operations 24×7 across multiple countries.
- Introduced Enterprise Mobility (Supply Chain) improving operational efficiency and employee productivity there by creating a paperless office environment.
- By adopting cloud based on demand solutions like email, we could leverage the benefits of flexibility, scalability and High availability that cloud computing offers.
- Implemented Maxxing: Real-time, Omni-channel Loyalty and Customer engagement platform
