Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is an Indian state-owned aerospace and defence company based in Bangalore, Karnataka. HAL is a Navaratna Status Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) under the Ministry of Defence. The PSU is involved in the operations of the aerospace industry which includes manufacturing and assembly of aircraft, navigation and related communication equipment and airports operation.
The company had some challenges they wanted to do away with including storing voluminous data, handling of duplicate letters in inbox, difficulty in selection of addressee and curtailing delay in tracking and responding on the external agency letters. For them, communicating with customers, suppliers and stakeholders efficiently was a problem. Many of these communications are time bound, strategic and linked to profit/loss/customer delight. They observed that due to delayed responses, customer satisfaction level was coming down and also statutory agencies were expressing their displeasure.
Solution deployed
For any correspondence, 50% of time is required for searching of associated information as per Gartner study. The paper-based organization of the documents and files lead to about 21% loss of productivity which otherwise can be avoided through digitally organized documents. This also leads to space saving to the tune of 60% as compared to manual storage which is in the direction of green office.
Keeping the Digital HAL mandate given by the company and also being a MoU parameter, SPV’- Saral Patra Vyavahar, an Online Correspondence Tracking System was implemented, says Rajeev Agarwal, Additional GM & Head IT, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd.
The tracking system has the following features:
- Scanning of letters received customers/ ministry
- Comments & routing
iii. Alert for delay in response
- Sender can view if the letter has been opened by the receiver.
- Draft reply approval
- Analytics and Dashboard
vii. Integration of digital signature
The company resolved data storage issue using NAS storage server, while auto handling of duplicate letters through database query was helpful for them to steer clear of duplicate letters in inbox automatically. They fixed the difficulty in selection of addressee using Ajax auto complete.
The implementation cost the company a sum of Rs 10.5 lacs (Rs 5 lacs in hardware, Rs 3.5 lacs in development and Rs 2 lacs in application software).
Business benefits
The company started getting benefits in a period of four months which include voluminous document handling and faster retrieval through calendar splitting algorithm. This helped them do away with the unwanted delays in response to customers and other important stakeholders. The new system saves them 10 prints per desk per day, along with operational efficiency. The company plans to upgrade to e-file system completely.
