Author: Mei Ling Tan

With mobility growing at an unprecedented pace, user dependence on smartphones and tablets has intensified. The mobile device, with its dynamic messaging, video conferencing, and voice options, is playing an enabling role to empower communication within the organization—regardless where employees are geographically.

For a company with extensive global reach as that of Bata Shoe Company—one of the world’s largest and oldest shoe companies with more than 33 production facilities in 28 countries on five continents—ensuring seamless collaboration between all of its facilities proved a challenge. Product and R&D teams in China, Singapore and other Asia-Pacific countries were spending too much time and money traveling to collaborate on design, production and operations planning; as were members of senior management whose valuable time was spent shuttling between offices.

“It has always been a hassle and costly affair whenever we tried to organise regional meetings or group discussions. This would normally take at least one month of coordination and planning before the actual event to gather every participant to a single location,” relates Jeremy Chong, regional manager for Finance and IT Projects.

Such arrangement afforded one to two business-critical meetings annually, but faced with an increasingly competitive business environment and other external factors, Bata recognized the need for the company to become more fluid. “This meant more collaboration both horizontally and vertically. To have fruitful and meaningful discussions, it wasn’t good enough to send out emails and collaborations that relied solely on public internet connectivity. These were not enough to deliver the kind of face-to-face discussions we wanted,” says Chong.

Seamless collaboration

It’s a different picture these days for Bata Shoe Company. Leveraging unified communications tools provided by Tata Communications, the company is now able to collaborate across multiple platforms and devices, all the while mitigating communication costs. Implementation, which began with a pilot rollout involving video conferencing end points deployed in Bata’s Singapore, Switzerland, Chile, Indonesia and India facilities, proved successful, providing high-quality video, an immersive face-to-face meeting experience and solid reliability.

“We did not have too much involvement during the whole implementation process as this was well managed by Tata Communications’ assigned project manager to us. Overall, the whole process was comfortable for countries that already have a developed infrastructure while we faced longer implementation in countries with less developed infrastructure,” reports Chong, adding that the company’s key critical criteria for choosing a unified communications vendor include the following: strong global coverage in the network infrastructure “as we are geographically diverse”; availability of the right technology that has to be user-friendly and easy-to-use; and strong customer service support available 24/7. “Tata Communications was chosen primarily because of its long-term relationship with us and its flexibility to meet our specific requirements. The team’s customer-oriented approach has played an important part as well,” he says.

The benefits

From an economic point of view, unified communications has proven to be quite cost-effective for Bata Shoe Company. Since implementing Jamvee across the enterprise, Chong reports increased productivity across the whole organization. “The frequency of group discussions and collaborations has invariably increased as the technology has provided an almost face-to-face environment. This has also indirectly affected the way the organization has deployed people. Instead of consolidating the entire team in one geographical location, we are able to comfortably have members of the team working locally, cutting down some of the hassles and inconveniences during a re-allocation,” shares Chong.

In terms of numbers, traveling costs were reduced by as much as 40 percent in some operations, saving the company $300,000 in the first year and generating a 400 percent return on investment. “From a social point of view, less flying means our executives have the valuable opportunity to spend better quality family time,” puts in Chong, adding that with the basic infrastructure now laid down, Bata is more confident about embarking on another phase of its IT journey. “We want to expand the usage of our investments to enhance cross-border collaborations horizontally through multiple devices. If this is successful, we will potentially shift from a pure physical office environment to a hybrid office environment,” he states.

According to Chong, this exercise was initiated and run by the business users themselves. “It has been an adventure, as well as a steep learning curve for us to grasp and understand the technology involved to support the solution we wanted. An important lesson we learnt is that not all IT implementations are the same and these cannot be managed in similar manners,” he shares. For enterprises looking to leverage unified communications in their business, Chong relates Bata’s insights:

• Listen to the users. “Listening is crucial as it enables a good understanding of the user’s business requirements, therefore providing the right solutions.”
• Be prepared to fail. “But learn quickly from mistakes to complete the projects.”
• The key change management, and most important, is education. “Before any implementation, we would showcase to each country the capabilities of this technology and how it can help them with collaborations and effective communication. After implementation, online trainings were conducted to ensure users are well equipped to use the facilities,” he says, adding, “a strong sponsorship by the CEO and Chairman helps make the process smoother as well.”