PCQuest, India 's most influential IT publication among Enterprise IT decision-makers from the CyberMedia group, has identified six most innovative IT implementation projects deployed successfully across the nation last year. 

This year’s PCQuest Best IT Implementation award winners were HDFC Standard Life, Punjab National Bank, West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company, North Delhi Power Supply, AIIMS and Thiagarajar College of Engineering.

The winners of the 4th PCQuest Best IT Implementation Awards were chosen from 250 nominations across 22 industries ranging from the mega-IT spenders like government, Banking finance and insurance, manufacturing, petroleum, and IT/ITES to niche ones like poultry, travel and tourism, real estate, construction, power and utilitities. There were 23 projects types spread across IT infrastructure and ERP deployments to projects like controlling appliances over the Internet, e-learning, mobility and security. 

PCQuest honoured six projects as the winners in special categories and gave 15 others special recognition. Out of these, HDFC Standard Life was awarded for the Overall Best IT project and Punjab National Bank for maximum business impact. Two projects were assessed as being the most innovative. These were Thiagarajar College of Engineering’s ERP project called TCENet; and West Bengal State Electricity Distribution’s Remote Meter Reading project. 

PCQuest Editor-in-Chief Shyam Malhotra said, “We saw an amazing range in the projects submitted, and the winners reflect that, from cutting-edge remote meter reading over wireless, video-based tele-medicine, to a college’s home-grown enterprise software application!

“The editors interacted with nearly a 100 top IT implementers to gauge how successful and effective these projects were,” he added. 

The editors also identified the key software and hardware platforms in demand today as well as the challenges that CIOs encountered while implementing these. 

Another utility company, North Delhi Power Supply was awarded the most challenging project award, and All India Institute for Medical Sciences’ (AIIMS) Tele-Medicine project was chosen as the project with the maximum social impact. 

The two power utilities implemented complex and innovative solutions to make a legacy system more efficient and to offer better services to consumers. 

North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL) needed to manage its network distribution more efficiently for which it needed good network maps. So, NDPL used GIS (Geographic Information System) to capture the maps. This enabled NDPL to know the details of each district, zone, grid station, and even of each consumer, at the click of a mouse; which helped in saving Rs. 1.26 crore in the very first year and allowed it to offer faster service to consumers and more cost-effective new network layouts. 

West Bengal Electricity Distribution Company Wins the Most Innovative Project Award 
West Bengal State Electricity Distribution Company Limited (WBSEDCL) needed a faster way of collecting meter reading data from multiple locations. So WBSEDCL decided to use GSM cellular modules within the meters, by which divisional and central commercial offices could instantly fetch meter readings remotely. This saved time, effort, and cost of sending hundreds of people to remote areas in the heat, dust and rains, for collecting meter data, and increased the overall efficiency of the revenue management system. The people thus freed up are been redeployed in more useful and remunerative activity. The redesigned meters are tamper-resistant, and any attempt to bypass or tamper with them is reported automatically and instantly—by SMS. 

AIIMS Tele-Medicine Bags the Award For Maximum Social Impact
From a social standpoint, the AIIMS telemedicine project has been successful in providing training, consultancy and expert opinions from AIIMS to hospitals and patients all over India via video-conference. The project connects 300 institutions and peripheral medical colleges all over India. Tele-consultation is conducted whenever required—for instance, if specialists are unavailable in remote locations or an institution needs a second opinion from AIIMS on some critical case. Experts from AIIMS assemble in the telemedicine section and live consultation is held between two or more locations. 

The system is currently used mainly for medical education. Experts at AIIMS connect to all the major medical institutes and perform live lab demos in specific medical areas, and students in remote locations also perform the same exercises. The system transmits patient reports and diagnostics back in real time, for AIIMS experts to diagnose remotely.

HDFC Standard Life was awarded for the Overall Best IT project 
HDFC Standard Life won its award for implementing a solution that eliminated paper from the office, except two places—one where the actual policies come into the system and are scanned, and the second, the warehouse where they are stored. A 300% savings in TAT was achieved by reducing the average policy issuance time from 5-6 days to 1.5 to 2.5 days. Even with a 100% increase in proposals, shift times post the new system reduced from 12 hours per day to 7 hours per day. HDFC also achieved a 40% reduction in time spent on queries. PNB’s enterprise management system helped it centralize all the IT resources and achieve an uptime of 99.5 percent. 

ERP Project from Thiagarajar College Gets Most Innovative Project Award
Thiagarajar College of Engineering made a system in-house which enabled employees and students to work from anywhere. TCENet is a web-based system that is designed and developed to handle the day-to-day activities of the college from admission to alumni association. 

At the time of admission, which is done online, the profile and user ID of each student is created. The portal has course-wise nominal rolls of students with their respective timetables. A faculty member can individually upload assignment topics to students. After the students have completed their assignments, they can upload their files to TCENet, which will be evaluated by the faculty. Similarly, all college circulars are posted on TCENet. For every circular, the target reader can be mentioned, such as students, staff, or a particular department. After the expiry date, the circular gets automatically deleted and unread new circulars are differentiated from old ones by color codes. All placement-related details are also available on TCENet. Other functions of TCEnet include biometric attendance for staff using finger print identification and smart cards. It also has integrated time and leave management, which provides easy maintenance of staff attendance. 

The Jury
The jury for the award was a blend of past year’s winners, IT users, IT industry, and the media. This year the six jurors were Dr. N. Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying Authorities for the Govt. of India, who chaired the group, Mr. R B Das, Group GM, Center for Railway Information System also last year’s winner, Mr. C R Narayanan, VP (IT), D S Constructions, Mr. Ranjan Chopra, CMD Team Computers and Mr. Ravi Aggarwal, President, Imaging and Printing Group, HP India, and Mr. Prasanto K Roy, President (ICT Publishing) Cyber Media. 

In this guide, PCQuest covered projects from diverse areas like Business Intelligence, CRM, Document Management, E-Learning, ERP, Information Systems Infrastructure, Logistics Management, Migration, PLM, Supply Chain and Workflow. 

About CyberMedia
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with thirteen publications (including Dataquest, DQ Channels and DQ Week, PCQuest, Voice&Data and Global Services) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas, and is a media value chain including Internet (www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), job board (CyberMedia Dice), content management, multimedia, and media education. 

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