The phenomenon of digitisation is gradually covering every sector in India, thanks to the rising technological innovations happening at a global level. In line with the trend, Kodak Alaris provides digitisation-based solutions to the government and the private sector; thus, easing their areas of operations, says Siddhartha Bhattacharya, Vice President, Global Marketing, Global Marketing, Kodak Alaris Information Management Division, in an interview with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts:
Can you share about the background of Kodak Alaris and its presence in India?
Our journey started in 1990, when digitisation started making its presence felt in the Indian market, and people learned to convert paper documents into digital images and started storing those in computer discs, unlike the previous practice of storing print documents. So, we started off with a new product range called document scanners. In the first decade, between 1990 and 2000, large-scale operations took place. We got associated with the Registrar General of India in the year 2000 in a very big way by becoming a dominant partner by producing scanners and that really marked the footfall of Kodak Alaris in India.
The second decade of our journey witnessed various enterprises joining the digitisation wave. Today, a number of enterprises are providing digitised solutions to sectors like Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare, Education, Retail, Logistics, etc.
The third and ongoing decade from 2010 till now has actually seen the transformation from digitisation to information management. There are two broad components of digitisation – enterprise content management and customer experience management. Kodak Alaris is the only company across the globe that deals professionally with expertise on information management and stands out from the pack. In India most high-end organisations are our customers, including private and public sector banks and healthcare industry.
We are virtually a two-year old company because of some restructuring of the organisation, which made us a whole new entity with the name of Kodak Alaris India Pvt Ltd.
“For the last two years, we are supporting the Digital India campaign of the Government of India and have defined 31 mission mode areas, which the government would be looking after, like better services for filing income tax returns and getting a passport quicker, among others”
What was the idea behind the launch of ‘Kodak Alaris Yatra 2016’?
The key goal of Yatra is to connect end user community with other range of products. Since we are only selling end-to-end solutions, it’s technically not easy to sell this and we have to make sure that everybody understands its implementation. So, what we conducted a campaign in 14 tier-I and tier-II cities wherein we showcased our product capability and our service capability and then derived what were the possible opportunities out of it. So, the idea behind Yatra is to cultivate a dedicated set of partners who would be able to co-operate and eventualise our products.
What are the industries Yatra will be catering to?
Well, it’s not only Yatra but the whole range of our products we are aiming for. One of the key focus industries would be the BFSI sector because all over the world, more advanced solutions and refined i m p l e m e n t a t i o n solutions happen first in the BFSI sector, including in India. This segment started in early 90s with branch enterprisation and core banking, along with cloud data analytics, which is why it’s one of the focus areas for us. Then the second focus industry would be the government sector because it also uses information management solutions to achieve the goal of better governance. For the last two years, we are supporting the Digital India campaign of the Government of India and with the start of it, we defined 31 mission mode areas which the government would be looking after, like better services to the citizen for filing income tax returns, get a passport in quickly, better service to citizen to get their land authority copy and so on. So, the opportunity and eventual goal in this sector is very large. Our estimate is that with India driving its governance largely on papers, the scope for information management is large and we work very closely with e-codes wherein all the old records are digitised.
Today, if we take an example of a judge, he can see digital images of all previous proceedings on his desktop and can cut short his/her time to make the final judgment. We are working with high courts in Mumbai, Delhi, Madras, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana and some other states. So it is basically a second focus area for us. Third would be the manufacturing space and we are looking after huge amounts of investments in this segment.
In India, manufacturing is driven majorly by foreign investments with lots of MNCs being part of it wherein they not only have a manufacturing plant but shared service centres and global shared service service centres to assist manufacturing plants in India and abroad. So, digitisation is at the heart of it and these centres help them to effectively leverage their investments in the core ERP and IT investments and every single piece of information is available in minutes on their computers.
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The fourth area is the healthcare sector, so whether it is government or private sector, there is a large amount of investment in this particular sector. The whole objective is to provide better services to citizens, be it in public hospital or a private one. Therein, we also need to ensure that proper records are maintained like medicine records, path lab reports and diagnostics reports.
“This is the right time (to associate with the government) for business like ours when there is a growing consciousness in the government in a way to move forward to provide better governance and better services through digitalisation and information”
With the Central Government announcing the Digital India mission, how do you see digital document evolving?
This is the right time for business like ours when there is a growing consciousness in the government in a way to move forward to provide better governance and better services through digitalisation and information. A lot of security aspects are being considered so there is growing awareness about digital preservation. We have also got associated with C-DAC which sets the standards for digitisation of government across the country. We shared the technology which we can enable in it with them.
The second aspect is at the grassroot level in the final implementation of eGovernance and what Ease and Quickness it can provide to the citizens of our country. If you take an example of a college student who wants to apply for a scholarship, he has to get a caste certificate. Ten years back, it was probably unheard that we can get certificate digitally through eGovernance.
As far the as the corporate sector is concerned, we are strengthening the BFSI sector. We are seeing different ways in which our own product can be used in banks. For example, various banks use our software for multichannel classification of complaints they are getting from the customers and if you don’t respond quickly, they might turn up to some other options available.
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