Principles of Operations Management - POM - Case study on Infosys GDM - 2008

Case Study ‐ POM Infosys Technologies Ltd. – The Execution

Specialists

Compiled by : Manish Ballal(G08019),Niraj Kothawade(G08024),Rajesh Ramadoss(G08029),Sairam Iyer ( G08034) ,Sandeep Vadnere(G08036)

Infosys Technologies Ltd.: The Execution Specialists

INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES LTD. : THE EXECUTION SPECIALISTS ................................................... 3

ABOUT THE COMPANY .............................................................................................................................. 4

GLOBAL DELIVERY MODEL (GDM) ........................................................................................................ 5

ADVANTAGES OF GLOBAL DELIVERY MODEL: .................................................................................... 6

ABOUT THE CLIENT .................................................................................................................................... 7

MERCHANT SERVICING APPLICATIONS PORTFOLIO ....................................................................... 7

MERCHANT CONTACT CENTER (MCC) .................................................................................................. 8

PRODUCTION SUPPORT PROCESS .......................................................................................................... 8

MCC SUPPORT AT CHENNAI .................................................................................................................... 9

EXHIBIT 1 PROJECT ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE ............................................................................ 10

EXHIBIT 2A SYSTEM LEVEL AGREEMENT OF CARD EXPRESS WITH INFOSYS ........................... 11

EXHIBIT 2B PRODUCTION SUPPORT PROCESS AT CARD EXPRESS .................................................. 12

EXHIBIT 3B PARETO ANALYSIS OF THE NUMBER OF PROBLEM RECORDS TO TRACE THE PAIN POINT ............................................................................................................................................................. 14

EXHIBIT 4 SYSTEM CONCEPTUAL DIAGRAM OF MERCHANT CONTACT CENTER ....................... 15

EXHIBIT 5 CURRENT SKILL LEVEL OF THE TEAM IN PROJECT ACTIVITIES ................................ 16

LEGEND ......................................................................................................................................................... 16

SOLUTION: ........................................................................................................................................................ 17


XLRI JAMSHEDPUR|SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND HUMAN RESOURCES

MANISH BALLAL

NIRAJ KOTHAWADE

RAJESH RAMADOSS

SAIRAM IYER

SANDEEP VADNERE

Infosys Technologies Ltd. : The execution specialists “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” - Nandan Nilekani, ex-CEO of Infosys said to Thomas Friedman, author of the non-fiction best seller “The World is Flat : A Brief history of Twenty-first century.

It was a Friday evening in December but surprisingly the entire Infosys team working with Card Express was in office .It had been a long hard day for Rohan,the onsite technical lead from Infosys who had been called by Steve Massal who was the director of Card Express’ merchant servicing technology operations for a discussion on the ongoing system outage that had resulted in a loss of $5 million in revenue and an erosion of the image of the Card Express brand.

The Card Express deal was won by Infosys last year after thwarting a lot of competing attempts from other major Indian and International service providers. The merchant servicing applications formed about 70% of the entire Card Express account at Infosys. This deal was viewed as a strategic move by Infosys senior management as it paved a way for Infosys to enter the hitherto untapped APAC and Latin America markets.

GMP 2008-09 batch students, Manish Ballal(G08019),Niraj Kothawade(G08024),Rajesh Ramadoss(G08029),Sairam Iyer(G08034) and Sandeep Vadnere(G08036) prepared this case. We would like to thank Prof.Trishit Bandyopadhyay for equipping us for this effort. This case can be used solely for class discussion. This case is not intended to serve as an endorsement, source of primary data or as an illustration of effective or ineffective management. Certain names and confidential data have been disguised.


The vibes that Rohan got out of the discussion with Steve were not very positive. He had the task cut out for his team. Infosys team was required to provide an immediate work around to the problem and do a detailed root cause analysis of the issue to prevent future issues in the merchant servicing systems.

About the company

Infosys Technologies Ltd1. (NASDAQ: INFY) was started in 1981 by seven people with US$ 250. Today, Infosys is a global leader in the "next generation" of IT and consulting with revenues of over US$ 4 billion.

Infosys defines, designs and delivers technology-enabled business solutions that help Global 2000 companies win in a Flat World. Infosys also provides a complete range of services by leveraging our domain and business expertise and strategic alliances with leading technology providers.

Infosys' service offerings span business and technology consulting, application services, systems integration, product engineering, custom software development, maintenance, re-engineering, independent testing and validation services, IT infrastructure services and business process outsourcing

Infosys pioneered the Global Delivery Model (GDM), which emerged as a disruptive force in the industry leading to the rise of offshore outsourcing. The GDM is based on the principle of taking work to the location where the best talent is available, where it makes the best economic sense, with the least amount of acceptable risk.

Infosys has a global footprint with over 40 offices and development centers in India, China, Australia, the Czech Republic, Poland, the UK, Canada and Japan. Infosys has over 91,000 employees spread across the globe.

1 www.infosys.com


Global Delivery Model (GDM) 2

Global Delivery Model is the most successful outsourcing model amongst all the other models. It’s a combination of onsite model and offshore model but unlike the onsite/offshore model wherein the offshore development center of service provider is located at only one place, in the global delivery model the service provider has its offshore development centers spread out across the entire globe. The service provider need not have their own offshore development centers across the globe but they can use the resources of their partners located around the globe, and thus follow a global delivery model. This provides the client with a large working team with varied qualities and expertise in different fields.

Tasks accomplished by the onsite team:

• Understanding the client’s requirements.

• Directly interacting with the client to get a better idea of their needs and changes in them, if any.

• Acting as a mediator between the client and the offshore development centers.

• Planning & Designing the initial steps of the project.

• Allocation of Tasks amongst the available resources.

• Testing the outcome of the project in tandem with the client’s team.

• Executing the project successfully at the client’s place.

• Provide the required support for maintenance.

• Tasks accomplished at the offshore development center:

• Detailed design that will be continuation of what the onsite team designed.

• Deciding any specific technological requirements for the project.

2 http://offshore-softwaredevelopment.com


Tasks accomplished by the offshore Team:

• Application development

• Testing before handing over to onsite team.

• Continuous technical support.

Global delivery model is preferred where the client requires that the job be done in a quick manner, which is made possible by the number of offshore teams working together towards the completion of the task. Also where the project is very big requiring sufficient skilled manpower to complete the task this is the only model, which provides solution in such cases. The level of risk involved is also minimum since even if any of the offshore development centers face any disaster the project work will not be stopped, as the work can be transferred immediately and continued by the remaining offshore development centers.

Advantages of Global Delivery Model:

• Lower Risks: In case of any disaster/emergency at one of the offshore centers, the work continues at or is transferred to other offshore development centers. So the risk involved is low.

• Round-the-clock productivity: 24*7 work cycle becomes possible because of the time-zone difference.

• Best Results: Accomplishment of high quality work is possible, as the client will get the benefit of skilled manpower spread out across the globe.

• Shorter lead-time: Shorter project completion time as the work is completed by a number of offshore development centers working together with the same target.

• Cost benefits: The cost saving benefits for the client resulting from offshore outsourcing is also appreciable.

• No new employee additions required: The service provider can provide the client with a large working team with varied skill set, which the client may not be able to employ for just the task at hand.

• No possibility of communication gap: Onsite team, which will be in direct contact with the client, is able to understand the client’s needs in a better way. So no chance of misunderstanding the client’s needs.


Faster Response: Because of onsite team’s presence response to changes in client’s requirements is fast.

Having a perfect co-ordination between all the offshore development centers and that too in accordance with the client’s satisfaction is a big task. However this limitation can be overcome today by making the best possible use of the most modern means of communication.

About the client

Card Express3 is a diversified global financial services company, headquartered in New York City. The company also has major offices in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Salt Lake City, Utah; Greensboro, North Carolina; and Phoenix, Arizona. The company is best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler's cheque businesses.

It is one of the top stocks that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In 2007, BusinessWeek and Interbrand ranked Card Express as the 14th most valuable brand in the world, estimating the brand to be worth US$20.87 billion.

Card Express has its own in-house technology team that interacts with the vendors located across the globe. The Card Express technologies team is responsible for development, implementation and support of more than 2000 applications that cater to various business units. Majority of the vendors are Indian IT service providers including Infosys, TCS and Cognizant.

Merchant servicing applications portfolio

Merchant servicing applications were on top of the priority list of Card Express’ IT strategy. The merchant servicing applications were built on diverse platforms. They were host centric and as well as distributed in nature. However These applications aimed at providing Card Express with tools to manage merchant information. The applications also provided an opportunity to Card Express to cross sell its different products to merchants. Merchant servicing was viewed as extremely crucial to preserve and enhance the brand image of Card Express.

3 The name has been changed due to confidentiality reasons.


Card Express had outsourced the development, implementation and support of the merchant servicing suite of applications to external vendors who worked in alignment with the Card Express Technologies division. Most of the vendors operated with a “Follow the sun” approach and in shifts.

Infosys was a late entrant in the Card Express account. However,because of its consistent high quality delivery and consulting skills to Fortune 500 companies. Infosys was selected as a preferred vendor of Card Express. Initially, Infosys was offered the post implementation support of the merchant servicing applications portfolio. It was a golden opportunity for Infosys to prove their worth for Card Express and pitch for future projects in the Merchant servicing and other portfolios.

Merchant Contact Center (MCC)

MCC formed the crux of the merchant servicing applications (see Exhibit 4). It had interfaces with multiple submission platforms and databases which made it extremely critical for business. MCC was used by more than 4000 call centre representatives in Card Express across US, JAPA, EMEA and LAC regions around the clock. Infosys handled the production support of this application. It had a team of 8 resources distributed in US and India (see Exhibit 1 and 5). A technical lead was stationed in New York and rest of the team worked in 3 shifts in Chennai. Rohan and Sethu were the team’s most experienced resources who had a prior expertise in the technology deployed across the MCC application. Other 6 resources were freshers and had no prior experience of working in a high pressure production support environment.

Production support process

Infosys team had to align with Card Express’ Problem Management process (see Exhibit 2a-2b) which, involved multiple vendors and application teams spread across several geographical locations in US, UK, Australia, Singapore and India. Card Express had prescribed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its vendors. The agreement outlined the escalation process and the resolution and turnaround times for problems.


The agreement also highlighted the Change Management process required for implementation of a bug fix and an emergency fix.

MCC support at Chennai

After the Infosys team came to the fore in August 2007 for production support, the number of problem records was stable at around 130/ month (see Exhibit 3a-3b). However, the number increased to more than 200 in October and November which was above the anticipated number of 175 .The team experienced a spurt of problem records by 22nd of December raising the count to 405.The records were raised from users in multiple markets and on diverse issues related to data retrieval and update.

23rd of December didn’t bring a cheer for the team and the application experienced a complete outage. The team’s cell phone started buzzing with multiple severity 1 problem records. The offshore team lead, Sethu and Rohan were continuously on call to find out a way out to restore the system to normalcy. Meanwhile, Rohan received a call from Steve who called him for a meeting to discuss the issue. Rohan soon realized that this Christmas may not turn out that well for Infosys.


Exhibit 1 Project Organization Structure

Source: Infosys Technologies Ltd.


Exhibit 2a System Level Agreement of Card Express with Infosys



Exhibit 2b Production Support Process at Card Express



Exhibit 3a Number of problem tickets in the support team’s queue after the project was taken over from Card Express



Exhibit 3b Pareto analysis of the number of problem records to trace the pain point



Front Office J2EE Application

Services

Front Office

Https

System Services( Framework, Core,

Communication,Data Access )

Analytics Engine

Quote Generation

Order Generation

TradeMonitoring

Engine

Hedging &

Risk Engine

Re-Pricing Controller

Pricing Engine

Positions KeepingEngine

Market Feed Gateway

Communication Adapter

In Bound Message Adapter

Market Data Message

Queue Adapter

Mubasher MTBS

LETS OMS Kondor+

External system Interface Gateway

Out Bound Message Adapter

FIX gateway Interface

Portia

Interface Controller Adopter

Hibernate OR Mapper Data Access Services

OMS DBPositions Keeping DB

Analytics, PricingQuoting DB

Oracle 10G

Ref Data DB

Core Business Services

Exhibit 4 System Conceptual Diagram of Merchant Contact Center



Exhibit 5 Current skill level of the team in project activities

Resources Skill Level

System Developer

1 Developer

2 Developer

3 Developer

4 Developer

5 Developer

6 LeadCommunication

Utility 1 1 2 2 2 3 2

Feed Types 1 1 3 2 1 3 2

Paper Letter Flow 1 1 2 4 3 1 2

Email Flow 1 1 3 3 4 1 2

Reject Processing 1 1 3 1 2 4 2

Card Processing 1 1 3 4 4 1 2

Image Utility 1 1 1 3 1 3 2

Project Lifecycle 2 2 3 3 4 4 1

Quality Process 3 3 4 4 4 4 2

Legend

Skill Level Description

1 Excellent

2 Good

3 Average

4 Bad


Solution: Root Cause Analysis : The root cause analysis using Ishikawa diagram should be done .


Scheduling: The scheduling should be revamped as follows.


Training: Training should be imparted to resources as follows .

Statistical Process Control should be used to prevent future quality lapsed.

Date post:	24-Jul-2015
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Principles of Operations Management - POM - Case study on Infosys GDM - 2008

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