Bajaj Electricals Ltd., an Indian consumer electrical equipment manufacturing company, is using the Riverbed® Digital Performance Platform to power its consumer-centric digital transformation.
This strategy is aimed at driving deeper engagement and transparency with Bajaj Electricals’ customers and distributors, overcoming branch office and retail outlet connectivity issues as well as end-user application performance complaints. Using the Riverbed platform, the company has been able to accelerate application performance substantially and dramatically improve end-user experience and better assess the impact of future IT change on performance, including a major shift to the cloud.
Bajaj Electricals’ business spans lighting, consumer durables like home appliances and fans, engineering and other projects such as wind and solar energy. The company operates 19 offices across the country and manages a chain of thousands of distributors and authorized dealers, over 400,000 retail outlets and more than 450 customer care centers.
In the wake of industry disruption and increased competition, Bajaj Electricals embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey in 2015 to drive deeper engagement with its end-consumers, most of whom purchase the company’s products through third-parties, and have limited direct exposure to the company. As Bajaj Electricals focused on digital technology as a critical enabler of their business, the pressure on IT grew – more complexity, higher business demands, and less tolerance for down-time and degradation.
“We started by automating key business processes, rapidly adopting new digital technologies and moving more and more apps to the cloud – and we were doing this often times in remote parts of India, where communications infrastructure is poor,” said Pratap Gharge, Executive President & CIO, Bajaj Electricals Ltd. “Our existing infrastructure couldn’t support all this change, and the performance of several of our business-critical apps began to suffer – user complaints skyrocketed. Additionally, lack of visibility into our IT environment made troubleshooting like finding a needle in a haystack – we couldn’t resolve issues quickly, which prolonged downtime, threatening our bottom line and throwing a massive wrench into our transformation plans.”
