Understanding customer value for enterprise software applications

Abstract

This project is an attempt to understand the business challenges of the Indian companies specifically in their supply chain. India has been witnessing a very good rate of economic growth over the last 5 years. Consumer spending and export growth are on the rise and so are the challenges placed on the Indian businesses. Adoption of technology to help solve business problems are on the rise. The players in the enterprise software applications (packaged products) are many in the US. A few of the major Indian companies have also implemented these products for their needs. However there are likely to be a lot more opportunities in this space. This project tries to explore the requirements of the Indian industry (in manufacturing/retail/distribution) in terms of their current business needs/challenges. There is an attempt to probe at which of these problems could be solved using packaged enterprise applications. The enterprise applications span a variety of software packages. However the context used in this project is that it is restricted to those domains for which Sterling Commerce provides solutions for. A primary research was conducted to find out the current challenges of select companies of Indian companies in their supply chain (both upstream and downstream).The current IT landscape of these companies was gauged to understand the extent of IT usage in solving problems. This is supplemented with data available from secondary sources. Based on the collected data, the key problems are identified. It then discusses a few customer case studies of current SC customers where similar problems have been solved using SC enterprise applications. Most of these case studies are outside India (primarily USA) but there are a lot of parallels. We then try to identify the similarities and dissimilarities between the Indian and US contexts and considering these, try to fit in possible SC solutions that could solve these identified problems. We also list out those problems that are not solvable by the current suite of SC solutions and provide recommendations for product roadmap. We then discuss the other players in the Indian market with similar products or services who can solve these problems. We also discuss a predictive model of enablers of success for SC in the Indian market. i.e. what kind of eco-systems need to exists, factors that act as catalysts/inhibitors etc. The report concludes by providing recommendations for SC for growing its business in India.