Tata Teleservices Customized Tally to Track Supply and Boost Business

Telecom service providers cater to their pre-paid customer base through retail partners who form a network of distributors and retailers. For a pan-India telecom service provider like TTSL — which has offerings in 22 out of India’s 23 circles — knowing which of its products work better in specific regions — and which don’t — enable strategic planning. It’s the sort of planning that allows TTSL to draw up product plans and manage an inventory of physical products like recharge scratch cards to ensure that an out-of-stock situation does not arise. 
The obvious approach — which Munj’s peers in other telecom companies tried — is to install an application at the distributor’s end that is tied online to the telecom company’s ERP. Telecom executives then asked distributors to enter sales data (like information regarding which products have been bought by a particular retailer) manually. The application would then send that information to the service provider’s ERP. Sounds simple, but there’s a catch: almost all distributors already use an accounting software, the ubiquitous Tally, to manage their finances. It is also where they feed their sales records into. By asking distributors to input data into the service provider’s application, telecom executives were basically asking them to replicate work — without any tangible benefit to them. It was the sort of application that made end user buy-in a make or break deal, something that some of Munj's peers at other telecom companies had found out the hard way.

But Munj wasn’t someone who would take the conventional and coax channel partners or the business to cough up an incentive scheme. He went beyond problem solving by completely circumventing the problem. He knew onlytoo well that Tally is a favorite amongst his distributors and with some quick thinking, he got a customized version of Tally built for them. The look and feel remained same except for a new, nifty, yet unobtrusive feature. Now information entered into Tally is captured by the add-on and sent to TTSL’s ERP system when an Internet connection is detected. To the end user, this process is transparent, and they can continue to use Tally without interruption even when the update is in progress. Since channel partners did not have to put
in extra effort to make this system work, they did not resent it. In fact, the system helps distributors by showing them their existing credit limit (used for e-recharges) with TTSL and the credit limits that various retailers have with him. The business need to track product movement through its supply chain is now a reality at Tata Teleservices — but it needed someone like Munj to find some cleaver ways of working around practical problems.

The Person Behind It

Shirish Munj

VP-IT, Tata Teleservices

Tally is a favorite amongst my distributors so I got a customized version of Tally built for them. The look and feel remained same except for a new,nifty yet unobstrusive feature