Having a conversation with Mr Gautam Chatterjee, MD and CEO of Exide Industries Limited is like taking a lesson on the energy journey of India.
Mr. G. Chatterjee, MD & CEO of Exide Industries Limited
After all, Exide has been in India for over 73 years and can rightly claim to have been a part of the young nation’s journey practically from independence till date. With sales of 100 million batteries a year and presence across 46 countries, Exide has seen its footprint grow manifold over these years.
With Great power comes Great responsibility, Spiderman and Mr Chatterjee might be eons apart but it fits the philosophy of Exide perfectly. “At any point of time 200-300 million batteries are under warranty, it is a nightmare for a person in service,” he says. This means the Customer Support team is forever busy trying to track complaints and resolve them. The big challenge for the team was to proactively address these issues so that before the customer knows he has a problem, Exide provides a solution.
In the words of Mr Chatterjee, the need was to change the dumb battery to a smart battery. The solution was SAP Cloud services. Exide decided to go with SAP S/4HANA for this objective. The different departments like Manufacturing, Finance, Sales and HR have to be integrated to drive the benefits of speed, productivity and real-time visibility to the organisation.
The Smart Battery has a SIM card as hardware which takes the data and interacts with the SAP cloud. This ensures a real-time battery health check and allows the backend team to proactively track battery performance. With the Smart Battery App on mobile, even the customer has the visibility to the battery life and can rest easy.
Results validated the initiative. This transformation has helped noticeably to reduce warranty claims and boost customer loyalty. Mr Chatterjee has a nice comment for SAP, “Customer does not see SAP, but sees a company, a much smarter company”.
