Interview with Debashish Ghosh, The Times of India Group

IFRA: After the instillation of several SAP and ppi Media systems for the automation of the advertising workflow and the general production of the newspaper, it was said that you might invest in the SAP ERP accounting system. Did you do it?

Debashish Ghosh: Yes, after we installed the IS-M/AM ad system from SAP and the automated workflow from the ad taking to the page production from ppi Media, we have done some updates and installed also the SAP ERP module, which is very popular among media houses. This module takes care of the finances, controlling, inventory and all this kind of tasks.

IFRA: An accounting system, however, is not a real business system where a company, and mainly a big one like The Times of India with its many editions and four million circulation, can store all the data and information created within the company to use it for business purposes. Do you have such a system also?

Debashish Ghosh: Indeed, we do have also a business system, which belongs also to SAP. It is a data warehouse, called BW, which allows us to draw all kind of data from our internal systems and sources, so that we can create analysis and reports out of the data warehouse. So, we do use business warehouse really extendedly for our performance monitoring, strategy-making and financing and all those areas. So, it is a complete business intelligence tool.

IFRA: What are the main advantages a newspaper can get from having a tool to analyse how the business is going?

Debashish Ghosh: In India, and at then end in any country of the world, the media industry, and more over the newspaper industry, is very dynamic in terms of doing businesses. Therefore, we need to be very quick in taking decisions and in realising what is being the impact of the marketing strategies we are putting into practice. This is why it is nowadays very important to have a business intelligence tool that can give you all the information that you want very quickly, in a matter of minutes rather than having to wait during hours to get a business report. So, given the fact that we are working and active in a very volatile environment and that it is very important today to take business decisions on a very fast pace, this tool has proofed to be very useful. Plus, another thing is that the business warehouse we have is not only fed with our own data but also is linked to a lot of third party sources that give us information about the developments of the market, about how the newspaper industry and the media industry in general are moving, about how other big newspapers are doing all over the world and, of course, about how some of our competitors are managing... We put all the data together and we can see all these entire analysis and information in a collective manner. This is a knowledge tool that helps us to define our strategy for the next month, the next five months, and the next year and so on... And this referring to all the areas of the business, such as marketing, pricing politics, production, launch of new products, customer centric strategies...

IFRA: Is this solution you are using from SAP customisable or is it a rigid and fix one that you cannot modify?

Debanish Ghosh: It is not a fixed solution, but a template based solution where you can customise the information you get and the way it appears or the sources you want to do a report. And in fact, we constantly improve it for our purposes as we go along.

IFRA: When it comes to IT decisions, many newspapers are confronted with the question of outsourcing. Should we outsource our IT infrastructure or not... Being India a country where IT companies are so innovative, what is your opinion about it? What has Times of India done?

Debanish Ghosh: At Times of India, we are not at his moment looking for outsourcing solutions, primarily because we have the feeling that the costs of outsourcing might be bigger than the ones that taking care of the systems ‘in house’ can create. Manpower costs are still low in India. But even more important than the expenses issues is for us the fact that when you outsource a task you might lose the advantage and effectiveness of getting the things done at a fast pace. Very often we need to have a solution tonight for tomorrow, and this kind of situation is one that might not work in an outsourcing environment very well, because we are restricted by the priorities of our outsourced partner and not only driven by our own priorities. We want to be independent in this aspect and this is why for the moment we do not consider outsourcing as something we want to go for, bur of course we have explored this possibility as well. So, we have our main servers for the whole newspapers centralised in Mumbai, while we have a disaster recovery centre in Delhi. We have 65 offices all over the country where we have basic IT infrastructure and networks, but the main hardware centre is in Mumbai.

IFRA: What is the biggest demand newspaper publishers have regarding business systems?

Debanish Ghosh: As always, and I think it is a typical situation, when you have been running a system for a while, you get used to it and somehow you wished it will work somehow better. But in fact it is clear that with this system we get information and reports in a matter of minutes, when before it took us days to create these analyses. So, other than small adjustments there is no bigger demand I can think of.

Page first published: 13.10.2008