Reliance Capital Saves Rs1.5 Crore With Remote Infrastructure Management

That’s mainly because Reliance Capitalis big. It’s made up by a number of group companies including Reliance Mutual Fund, Reliance Life Insurance, Reliance ConsumerFinance, Reliance Money, and Reliance General Insurance, among others. Itsinterests cover almost the entire spectrum of financial solutions from asset management to insurance and from consumer finance to broking and distribution.
Not only is it large, it’s also still expanding. Keeping with the population’shigher savings rate (India’s financial savings as a percentage of GDP has been growing 15 percent CAGR), in the last fiveyears, Reliance Capital’s  revenues have grown 14-fold and its workforce’s has swelled 11-fold. The cost of servicing the IT needs of so many more employees (over 25,000 at last count) worried the Rs 5,976-crore company. Over time, it’s outsourced IT helpdesk had bloated to a 200-strong team. About 70 members were located in Mumbai — where most of Reliance Capital’s multiple businesses were headquartered — and the rest were spread out across India.

As the team grew up so did associated costs including real estate, transportation and other administrative costs. “Our employees are scattered across the country. And every time there is a complaint, the first thing I have to do is send someone to that location to find out what the issue is. That itself is a cost. It’s a major cost,” says Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and group technology officer, Reliance Capital. Phanasgaonkar already knew that most of the issues the support team dealt with were standard ones including password problems, or issues with lotus notes and e-mail configuration. Which made remote infrastructure management a possible solution. “Between 60 and 70 percent of the issues (the IT support team faced) could be looked into remotely,” he says.

Remotely managing infrastructure to cut costs is a well-documented approach. Research firms like Gartner and Alsbridge suggest that remote infrastructure management can reduce IT support costs by 25 percent or more. But Reliance Capital went further. It also decided to centralize its helpdesk and move the entire unit to a service provider with offices in Mysore, where the costs of both real estate and talent were considerably lower, earning them big savings. However, getting those savings wasn’t easy. The IT team had to ensure that all their PCs, which were previously connected to an onsite helpdesk, now linked to a helpdesk offsite. Phanasgaonkar says it took them about six months to make the shift to remote infrastructure management. “There are various departments and businesses and we had to watch out against working during their business-critical timings,” he says.

And they also braved what is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in going for remote management: dealing with the mindset of a generation of employees used to seeing an engineer attending to their problems in person. The new system required users to take a few more steps to register their problems so that the IT support team could help them. “Most of these teething problems take some time. All we can do is keep educating our users,” says Phanasgaonkar.
But the move to remote infrastucture management has been worth the challenges. For one, the project brought down the total number of employees needed to run the helpdesk from about 200 to 40 and trimmed downtime.
These are benefits that have not gone unnoticed. “We have been able to save Rs. 1.5 to 2crores, and these are huge cost savings in today’s environment,” says Amit Bapna, CFO, Reliance Capital, adding “The turnaround time has also increased and there are now fewer engineers employed.”

The Person Behind It

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar

Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, president and group technology officer, Reliance Capital

solution. “Between 60 and 70 percent of the issues (the IT support team faced) could be looked into remotely,”