Outgrown legacy systems and increased server maintenance issues were unexpectedly pressed on eBioscience, a research reagent manufacturer, as it worked to keep pace with its expanding business needs. The expansion requirements created a no-win situation for the company, with a non-scalable platform baseline, inadequate IT infrastructure and sub-standard reporting capabilities. An add on to these woes, strict compliancy requirements were becoming increasingly difficult to meet for the IT department. They needed a new, efficient system to provide better visibility into shipments, custom order turnaround time and receivables. The reagent manufacturer was not able to settle on any appropriate solution or application to meet these needs. At this point, they chanced upon Abaris, a Teledata Technology Solutions’ (TTS) company, which specializes in the delivery of Oracle based solutions. Within four months, eBioscience saw a complete revamp of its business applications with Oracle’s business application suite. Today, the company tracks receivables and the orders of next day shipments in real-time, with an up-to-date, scalable platform for any business expansion. In 2006, TTS was spun off from its incubating company, Teledata Informatics and is currently an IT consulting firm with core competencies in Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and IT hosting operations.

For a venture to ultimately succeed, crisis-management is a core competency requirement and CEO, Anush Ramachandran of TTS has learnt this lesson well. Two years down the line in 2008, when TTS was in the midst of etching its footprint across the IT service industry, the Wall Street bubble burst which brought with it the subsequent global recession. The global effect on IT market revenues was a decline for TTS revenues by over 20 percent, driven largely by decreases in available business, rates and license fees from customers. The consulting firm was faced with not only an absolute decrease in revenue, but also with an additional challenge of generating less revenue for the same amount of effort. The economic uncertainty did not deter Ramachandran or David Price, the President of TTS, who is currently transitioning to the role of a CEO. The recession presented them with the platform to confront certain organizational and operational assumptions that had crept into their business model during the more prosperous times when the economy was vibrant. They conducted a major, low level review of almost every single financial assumption built into their operating model and analyzed the manner in which the individual divisions operated both externally and internally with each other.

The Strategic Leap

“In many instances, we discovered that some of our units were delivering revenues using third party companies as opposed to utilizing available resources elsewhere in the company. This was because the evolution of the business had not forged the necessary “organizational wiring” to enable the right flow of information as well as the corporate policy and directives to maximize inter divisional cooperation,” reveals Price. Keeping the discoveries in mind, a new organizational blueprint was introduced that has removed the historical boundaries within the company and the company is implementing a global sourcing and delivery strategy that integrates the U.S. operations with their other organizations in India.
This new organizational approach complemented the growth initiatives with three elements. First, there is a growing demand for new solutions to support the emerging SmartGrid and Smart Metering Markets, which in turn is driving a demand for consulting, products and solutions both in the U.S. and Europe. Hence, they designed a vertical industry strategy focused on Energy and Utilities (E&U) market to provide their enabling data and transaction management solutions and contact intelligence solutions like Call Logic. The latter solution, will be expanded to become Contact Logic by 2011, incorporating new capabilities to integrate web, email and chat traffic into the overall contact intelligence solution. “This critical element in the ongoing success of TTS will also require quality relationships with key global vendors to enable the widest deployment of our IP solutions as possible,” says Ramachandran.

Second, the IT Implementation and Operations Services Strategy drives a renewed focus on the implementation and support of the Oracle eBusiness Suite, coupled with implementation and support services for the Amdocs CRM suite of products. Their core Oracle Solutions business as well as the CRM business have evolved and now deliver the full service solution packages. The Oracle business has been particularly successful in converting implementation customers into long term support and consulting relationships. Along with new solutions, the final ingredient in the re-invention of the company was the restructuring of the corporate management and global delivery operations processes. These strategies have already begun to hit the target, for instance, TTS new account management approach has yielded a significant long term IT partnership contract wherein TTS will assume the overall role of IT management and operations.