T&M Industry in India : FY14 should reinvent "Total Solution" in our industry.

In India T&M industry and all the vendors are having very unique situation where the Word "Total Solution" is being used more as a cliche, whereas the dilemma is how to manage it in our conditions for better customer satisfaction and internal companys competitive advantage.All this requires the vendors to have unique skills and strategies how to present a value proposition & Execution.

The fist requirement is to think through and define their Business broadly enough so it has objectives flexible enough covering portfolio of products and services for yielding different revenue streams.Rather than being unnecessarily too niche,like Communication T&M ,simply say Broadly the T&M ! The approach of aggregator becomes tenable,if these vendors are flexible to tie as a Partner with other companies.This naturally comes to those companies who are open, and transparent  and most importantly customer service oriented. Services of all kind wraped around T&M will be good
thing to have in our quiver.

One of the most important thing is how easy it is to do business  with us and our companys staff.Web based facility can make that differentiation.Can he pay by Credit card? Online interface possible?Credit terms need many layers approval,or the frontline staff fully empowered! Ultimately all this will determine both loyalty and Customer Advocacy for our company and brand.How much we have stayed well with customers in the past will determine how much more loyal they will be in future.

Customisation and localisation will be other requirements of mobile nature of anytime access customers, and we need to be equipped with our processes and systems to respond to the customer.A hard brick-and- mortar like business in T&M really requires to be changed drastically.We will discuss some T&M specific work processes needed in the blog posts to follow.Will FY14 see some of the things making a T&M vendor responsive of all this? Interesting isnt it?

T&M Industry in India : Can FY14 provide a new paradigm to us?

PERSONAL  TV, PERSONAL COMPUTER, PDA, MOBILE DEVICE EVERYTHING PERSONAL than why not PERSONAL  T&M?  Why not  then per capita T&M ?


Decades back whenever I used to travel in the country side for selling the T&M instruments a peculiar curiosity used to get better of me. In this country of low GDP and personal income are sophisticated instruments with top Electrical specs to boast are really needed.Our generation had a very modest earnings and if you had a "four figure salary"  it could ensure you recieve matrimonial proposals.Over the time this feeling really was relegated to back burner and we got on our usual job to selling,beating quota, tackling competition and so on.

With the arrivals of liberalisation the ninties really saw the supply side constraints loosening up and we started shifting to an era of abundance and newer cheaper technology getting available.We saw the personal Discman, the personal gaming console and lot new personal technologies products which were getting to prosperous general populations. HP had also introduced a platform Personal Instruments (PI) from our important instruments factory that time.The product was later withdrawn for some reasons unknown to the field.But it created my above mentioned curiosity deeper and even stronger in intensity.

Later working as the CEO for Asiapac south in another competitor company ,we brainstormed among the senior Strategic Leaders Meeting why we shouldnt evolve a concept of quota setting to each of our Asian Country based on population ! This was wild, particularly for two giants with 1Billion plus population each............................We from India and China were naturally excited but internally scared as Sales Manager in us came to the fore ! You see our raison de tre was meeting target and we were not interested being termed as under achiever,if we didnt meet those" astronomical" numbers.

However now seeing in the hindsight this is not a very wild concept.India has subscriber base of 90 Cr mobile subscribers and the smartphone percentage growing every week,all sort of mobility,broadband injected, Tweets,Apps and Blogs becoming order of the day why cant be have a personal smart instruments getting embedded in this 4G or later 5G device! And if that is so why we cant have our sales target of T&M instruments set as a complex multiplier of our population? Will this FY14 create this new paradigm?? 

T&M Industry in India : FY14 impacts Aerospace,Defense,Security related business!

DEFENSE CONTRACTORS, INCUMBENT & NEW PRIVATE  AND OTHERS


We had covered the Defense and Aerospace related discussions in several earlier blogs in details.With what is actually happening to the Indian economy on ground today, a quick review is in order.The severe twin defecits of CAD and FiscD, sliding Rupee,Mounting Short term debt to both GDP and total debt rising etc have impact on the buying power of technology products and services to the ASD sector of the country.We need to workout both short term and long term operational plans to tide over these difficulties.A good amount of pragmatism and fiscal prudence is needed to have balance between operational valour and valet.

We need to see the big picture first.Current size of the Global ASD industry is more than a Trillion Dollar and growing till 2018 at 5-6% or so. The Indian maintenance,repair,overhaul and auxiliary services market for both Mechanical/Aeronautics as well as the marine/electronics part can be easily 3-4 B$ in 2016-17. Now what we have to ensure is under the present economic conditions how we maximise the procurement through indigeneous sources-local supplies,manpower and indegenisation bypassing the impact of Re slide. The exercise will require analysis and taxonomy details of the materials and services.A close coordination will be required between Defense Contractors, Services IPC wing, inspectors and vendors associations. This can be a little complicated as different agendas can be at work.This is where for ASD sector, role of Defense Offset Authority of India can come in.Idea is to save FE in procurement and strategise reduce,reuse,repair and recycle wherever possible.

One of the way this can be done is segregate projects related to Electronics /Technology intensive programs first.Electronics is all pervasive in Radars,EW, Avionics, Communications,Electronic Security and allied gear.We can also review the Big Ticket top 20 procurement programs maturing in the ensuing fiscal. In coordination with the OEMs and offset agencies we define and outline program where we can achieve approx 10% more indigenisation than budgeted/planned earlier.This will help us stay even-keel with pre-slide Re level too.The contracts can be then awarded on fixed price basis for FY14. Longer term off course we need to go for more FDI, local investment and massive SME and MSME participation of local entrepreneurs in the sector