The Technology team at PEL continued its journey from being a Strategic Business Partner to co-own business outcome of tech led transformation with the business by:
In line with the Company’s Technology Vision ASPIRE - ‘Aspire to be a Strategic Partner through Innovative solutions for Rapid Growth Enablement’ — the Technology team continues to transform the business through several technology & digital-led initiatives and programmes.
After having created a strong foothold in getting technology ready for business, PEL’s focus for this year has been to get business ready for technology. The Company continues to embrace the bi-modal technology approach of Strengthen the Core and Build for Future.
Established in FY 2019, the Digital CoE is at the core of the Company’s digital ecosystem which focuses on establishing newer ways of working, effectuate technology and enhance the business value of technology.
PEL leverages different technologies and processes, established under the Digital CoE, to benefit partners, customers, employees and machines. These include Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Future-tech like multiple Low-Code/No-Code Platforms among others.
The Digital CoE promotes an effective and efficient work environment, enhances communication with customers, collaborates with partners and facilitates strategic decision-making
Few initiatives by Digital CoE towards enhancing the business value are:
The IT Academy is an integrated platform that addresses gaps in individual technology capabilities and expands domain knowledge by providing access to a multitude of learnings. It focuses on role based and skill based learning journeys of all technology employees globally and keeps him/her ahead of the curve. In total, 4 role-based skill development journeys in fields of Process Automation, Analytics, information security and other cutting-edge applications & tools were conducted in FY 2022 to enable employees leverage newer technologies better and faster. 153 employees from various business units of the organization across the globe became a part of these learning journeys.
Retail and Wholesale Finance IT continue to move forward on the digitization journey. Retail finance continued to scale the core Loan Origination Platform for new product lines (Used Car Loans, Unsecured Business Loans), and across all erstwhile DHFL branches. We have also set up an in-house software development team in Bengaluru to build digital products that help serve our customers. Key initiatives include:
Wholesale Finance IT upscaled and integrated multi-cloud platform, with prime focus on digitizing the complete loan lifecycle as well as data, leveraging latest technologies in agile manner. With external fintech integrations, we have created a robust analytical framework which can be leveraged to build the next generation analytics.
As we grow and scale our Pharma businesses, we anticipated opportunities in our current technology aligning to evolving business vision and strategies. To enhance PPL’s profitable growth momentum and create a future ready organization, we embarked on a Digital Transformation Journey – Project Catalyst. Our intent behind undertaking the project is to deploy technology as a catalyst with a vision to sustain profitable growth by enhancing customer experience, frictionless supplier collaboration, and highly productive and efficient workforce. The objective is to build an intelligent organization by leveraging digital ERP at the core complemented by innovative Edge applications, Hyper-automation, and Data analytics.
We carried out the strategy phase of this journey to draw a tech enabled 3-year digital transformation roadmap consisting of more than 50 initiatives covering enterprise-wide processes, technologies, and people across all the PPL entities.
Project Catalyst is expected to bring a significant shift in our ways of working by moving from manual processes to embedding technology and digital across processes to achieve better business outcomes more effectively and efficiently.
Piramal Pharma is leading the pack in the age of digital transformation. Our Digital, Quality, and Infrastructure teams have paced up their efforts to become a strategic business partner by harnessing new technologies and delivering immense value to our business. Technology strategy continues to support the business strategy by focussing on customer, quality, workforce, and capabilities in the following areas
Expanding the Tech blue-print: We have been expanding our tech blue-print to the newly acquired sites, namely, Sellersville (US), Turbhe (India) etc. Various tools and products on Quality, EHS, IT Infrastructure, Security, and ERP have been deployed or are planned to be deployed to improve productivity, efficiency, and compliance at the sites.
We have also implemented Manufacturing Execution System (MES) at one of the sites to electronically control, monitor, and document the manufacturing processes digitally in real-time through the entire manufacturing cycle to batch release. We are progressing on our cloud native IT infrastructure to be more efficient, strong, and secure with prime focus on business agility, automation, and better user experience.
Data-Driven Culture: Data Analytics continues strong collaboration with strategic Business functions so that critical decisions are based on data driven insights. This initiative has helped automate several business KPIs across the value chain improving efficiency and accuracy, allowing faster decision-making, streamlining business processes, and help increase productivity. Various salesforce automation and reporting tools have been implemented for both B2B and B2C markets to enhance cross communication and visibility within the sales team, improved lead generations and product visibility tracking in turn improving the success rate of converting leads to opportunities.
Enhanced Customer Experience: The online traffic to our websites has increased to 50,000+ views since we launched Digital Walkthrough of sites using 3D virtual reality tool during pandemic
Exceptional Employee Experience: PIRO Chatbot was launched in India last year to address employee related queries improving HR process efficiency. It has been successfully adopted and embraced by the employees. It acts as a central tool for employees to access policy-related information. Since launch, more than 50,000+ queries have been raised and addressed with 98% accuracy.
Be Safe@Work: As an organization, we are fully committed to achieving excellence in Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS). IT collaborated with EHS to launch a completely digitized solution globally, MySafe App for automating manual EHS activities such as Incident tracking, inspections and observations, CAPA management and monthly performance reporting. This has enabled Single Source of Truth across all manufacturing sites and help take corrective actions for Employee Safety.
Digital Simplification: Successful deployment of AI-powered, Capex Bot across various manufacturing sites has simplified the capital expenditure approval process, thereby reducing the average lead time by 72%. We have leveraged RPA to automate Amazon Ads report for Consumer Products Division, to help business to take faster decision with accurate data saving almost 650 man-days per year.
Today, companies have more data, and more ways to use it, than ever before. In the right environment, with the right enablers, data and analytics drive growth. One of the most potent forms of analytics is Artificial Intelligence (AI). By helping companies detect, and even anticipate, behaviour and patterns, AI has transformed areas like customer service, retail analytics, and industrial automation. It enables faster, better decision making and can result in massive competitive advantage.
PEL’s presence in its two core businesses – Financial Services and Pharma – gives the Company access to a significant amount of data. Financial institutions have deployed analytics and data-driven capabilities to increase growth and profitability, to lower costs and improve efficiencies, to drive digital transformation, and to support risk and regulatory compliance priorities. Pharma companies too, have been amassing an enormous amount of data pertaining to sales, operations, research & development and patient behaviour to manage costs and risks, while providing quality services to their clients.
At PEL, key decision-makers across the organization leverage analytics to gain data-driven actionable insights and have embedded this approach in day-to-day processes. The Company has developed tools with diverse applicability and replicability across both the Financial Services and Pharma businesses.
As data-driven decision making becomes an essential part of PEL’s everyday operations, it is strongly pursuing technology-enabled opportunities and adapting contemporary best practices to deliver exceptional business value.
In the Financial Services business, primarily Retail Lending, we are extensively using AI/ML, Decision Sciences and automated Business Intelligence (BI) in every aspect of the business. With the help of these modular next-gen capabilities, enabled by the India stack, we have leveraged AI/ML and Decision Science to re-imagine the entire customer journey. We have implemented real-time AI/ML models in critical path of business decision-making in key areas such as sourcing, credit, fraud, cross-sell, attrition, collection buckets, NPA addition and recovery management.
At the time of acquisition, we had developed proprietary AI/ML models to predict the default risk in DHFL’s retail portfolio. The models used 52 inputs across customer risk, collateral risk and demographics and estimated the defaults over the next 12 months. The output of these models was factored into the deal valuation. The asset quality of the DHFL retail portfolio remains in line with expectations. The incremental NPA formation has largely been from the ‘high risk’ segment as predicted by ML-models. Furthermore, the model efficacy was well-tested during the COVID 2nd wave.
We have built a best-in-class data science team with top talents from leading technology institutions and are working on cutting-edge data science workbench hosted on cloud. We have set-up a Digital Center of Excellence (CoE) in Bangalore and hired ~400 employees in the technology & analytics team.
We continuously monitor the ML models to effectively drive analytics driven business decisions. For seamless decision-making, we have integrated our in-house application/loan management systems with cloud, multi-bureau, third party KYC/AML/Fraud/credit service providers and lending partners using Application Programming Interface (API). We continue to leverage various external partner integrations, thus, creating a unique customer experience.
Applications processed
Disbursed
Customers queued
Collected
Cases processed
Retained
Loans
disbursed
KPIs tracked
Use cases
live
* Numbers correspond to FY 2022
PSI: Population Stability Index
CSI: Characteristic Stability Index
AUC: Area Under the Curve
In the Global Pharma Business, analytics is one of the key initiatives. During the last year, multiple analytics use-cases were developed, which were mostly descriptive, diagnostics in nature and few were for predictive modelling. The analytics use-cases and KPIs are mostly a part of Finance, Quality, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Customer Centricity, EHS and others.
Sustainability, robust data and best-in-class user experience empowers ourpersonnelacrosssiteswithinsightfulinformationonmultipleKPIs that play a major factor in to improve performance, productivity and data-drivendecisionmaking.
Use of data analytics has been instrumental in the identification of the following goals for the Consumer Healthcare Division: