My belief has strengthened further, having gone through the challenges posed by the global slowdown. There were countries which were affected badly and ones which weren’t. The scenario is no different for enterprises. Most of us have been putting efforts towards addressing the basic issues like increasing efficiency and productivity along with cost optimisation i.e. doing more with less. LG India is no exception when it comes to responding to such situation. But where LG differed was when our CEO strongly felt this is the right time to invest in certain strategic areas in order to but build and sustain a rock-solid foundation for tomorrow.

I found myself in the centre stage of all the initiatives taken up by our organisation. The brief was to address basic issues around sustainability for the short to mid-term and to invest in future as a part of a long-term objective of building tomorrow’s organisation.

It is impossible to think of an initiative without IT. In the year that passed by, IT has taken up many initiatives in different functions. Some of the major initiatives were:

HR: We worked on a Training Need Identification system, where the training needs of an employee are captured, and the progress is measured every quarter.

Finance: To address the Enterprise Risk Management and Waste Elimination within the department, we took steps such as host to host payment and global netting.

Supply Chain: We invested heavily on global platform called GSCP (Global Supply Chain Planning), which helped us improve forecast capability and meet the market index by 15-20 percent and bring down our inventory levels thus optimising cost and improving operational efficiency.

Customer Service: Customer service being a key focus area of LG, we took several initiatives. Some of the major ones are 211, VOC (Voice of customer) and Happy Call etc.

IT: Some of the key initiatives on the IT front were virtualisation and consolidation, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Green IT and Video Conference.

I think there it is about time IT practitioners rolled up their sleeves and demonstrated the capabilities of IT in making visible difference in the way organisations work. It is only IT can make organisations sans boundaries and make collaboration possible across the geographies. Thomas L Friedman would not have said ‘world has become flat’, if IT was not there. I firmly believe that the foundation of better tomorrow rests largely on the way organisations embrace IT, and we as IT enablers have a great road ahead.