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Indian enterprises are increasingly realizing the importance of IT in business growth. Wellness industry player, VLCC, is one such company that is banking on technology to push future growth. The company, which till recently did not have a CIO/CTO, has appointed one and is according high priority to IT as a game-changer.
Vidur Kohli has recently taken over as the CTO of VLCC. With more than 25 years of experience in IT, Kohli has chalked out big plans for the company.
“I would be working closely with all the Group businesses and their departmental heads to integrate new developments in the field of digital technology with the existing business management operations and processes with a view to bring out greater process efficiencies,” he says.
Top on Kohli’s priority list is Business Intelligence. There is a walk-in of about 5000- 6000 people on weekdays and 8000-10000 on weekends at VLCC wellness centres across India. VLCC has a presence in over 300 locations across 121 cities and 16 countries with direct company managed operations in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Malaysia, Singapore, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. The humongous amounts of data thus generated could yield valuable insights for the company.
Explaining the reasoning with an example, Kohli says, “In the marriage season, facials go up as people get it done even when they are distributing wedding invites. With a BI solution in place, we can have promotions and activities around it. Besides, wedding season varies across the country, and it can help us do targeted activities.”
The BI deployment will also help in institutionalizing all the information that is presently held by experienced individuals.
VLCC is currently evaluating solutions. “We want the best of breed solution. We are taking out time in evaluating as it is a complex architecture. The CRM has to read off the POS, which is going to be based on the reservation system. The slimming software will require it as will the app and the portal. We will also need to find out how the APIs will transfer the date from one to other,” says Kohli. He intends to implement BI in the next 6 months.
Realizing that additional revenue will come through new customers and making them understand and aware of its treatments and services, VLCC is coming up with a host of technology-enabled features for customers.
There are plans of starting a YouTube channel of recipes. The company can simply send a video link to the customer for cooking the desired recipe. Development of an app (as a means of booking an appointment with a specific person at a specific outlet as well as educating people) is also underway. VLCC is also planning “video conferencing sessions of its founder, Vandana Luthra, with a couple of hundred customers” to further enhance awareness.
Meanwhile, Kohli has started rolling out other smaller initiatives. He has initiated a knowledge management intranet on open source platform that will go live shortly, and has also initiated the e-commerce site.
“Going forward, I would want everything on the cloud. I would like to see the top management open their smart phones and see how many sales have happened globally,” he adds.
As a leader with over two decades of experience, Kohli has expertise in managing large teams over diverse geographies, and has held senior leadership positions in companies such as IBM and GE.
As the CIO of IBM Global Delivery India, the software and services exports business of IBM in India, Kohli supported an organization of 55,000+ users spread across multiple locations in India. His responsibility spanned all IT infrastructure; such as networks, IT security, hardware and software tools, internal applications etc. He managed an annual budget of USD 100 million.
While at the Delivery Center, Kohli was successful in driving internal IT costs down, simultaneously improving the quality of service. He transformed the IT organization to focus on the end/external customer.
In his 5 year tenure with GE Capital India, Kohli held various leadership positions such as CIO for Corporate and Commercial Finance and Vice President Technology and Service Delivery Leader at GECIS (now Genpact). While at GE, his key achievements included creating a new line of business (content management) as well as winning external (non GE) customers.
Kohli has a bachelor’s in Management Computer Science, from the University of Wisconsin (USA), and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Marquette University (USA). He worked for a couple of years in the US, prior to returning to India.
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