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Indian Railways. MARKETING. Shift from the „Supply‟ concept to the „Marketing‟ Concept. NEED: Competition from low cost airlines (LCAs) like Air Deccan. Time of travel. Fares. What has been done…. Increase in number of super fast trains. Reduction in fares
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MARKETING • Shift from the „Supply‟ concept to the „Marketing‟ Concept. • NEED: Competition from low cost airlines (LCAs) like Air Deccan. • Time of travel. • Fares.
What has been done… • Increase in number of super fast trains. • Reduction in fares • Differential pricing based on time of booking: The „Tatkal‟ scheme. • Automatic upgrades to passengers. • Improvement in service quality.
Introduction • Indian Railways (IR) was the largest railway network under a single management in the world. IR was often called the 'lifeline of India', because it provided a source of livelihood to a large number of people and brought long-distance travel within the reach of the average Indian. IR was also the largest employer in the world, directly employing about 1.6 million people (as in 2003). In addition to this, it was estimated that it provided indirect employment to over seven million people. One survey in the early-2000s revealed that one in every ten Indians depended on IR, for his livelihood, directly or indirectly. IR carried, on an average, 17 million people across the country everyday.
Problem • by the late-1990s, IR was at the crossroads. An inability to reconcile its social and economic objectives, a growing number of accidents and the burgeoning importance of airlines and roadways that ate into its market share, burdened the operations of IR and caused a decline in revenues. • Analysts felt that privatization, partial or complete, would be the best solution to IR's problems. However, privatization had some inherent difficulties which made it an unviable option for a government department of the size of IR. • By the early-2000s, IR had realized the need to keep up with the changing socio-economic scenario in India and had begun implementing a number of schemes designed to improve operations.
Planning the movement of trains, deciding on precedence and crossings, forecasting train arrivals and providing this information to all the concerned within the system, is a critical element of day-to-day operations for the railways, in order to achieve efficiency, ensure safety, and provide customer satisfaction. • Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) – an organization in-charge of IT projects under the Indian Railways – selected Wipro for designing and deploying the Control Office Application (COA). The project is part of the Indian Railways overall endeavor to use IT applications for improving planning and resource utilization for Indian Railways.
The Challenge • A large network combined with heavy traffic, both passenger and freight with wide variations in running patterns, makes the task of train controlling and operations a very difficult one. • Section Controllers who are assigned to control a portion of the network within each divisional control office, used to manually record the movement of trains on a train chart, while constantly keeping track of various parameters needed for efficient planning. • The control chart is a time-distance graph which is used to control and plan the movement of trains. • It is used to ensure that scheduled passenger trains run on their paths, ensure efficient paths for unscheduled freight trains, forecast the movement of trains and provide information on arrivals and departures as per commercial requirements. • A good controller constantly optimizes on resources and ensures trains run smoothly through the system, reducing detention of both scheduled and unscheduled trains. • With increasing traffic levels, the Section Controllers were often constrained by the need to document every event (i.e.., train arrival/departure, track failures, crew change, signal status, fuel status) and yet focus on their primary duty of planning and reporting the movement of trains. • The existing system also involved a lot of paper work by support staff who were required to replicate the operational data given in the control chart to various registers. • As a result, the core activity of advance planning and timely reporting of train movements was getting diluted. Consequently, management also had to make special efforts to obtain the information required for good decision-making. • Indian Railways decided to automate the process of controlling train operations to ensure greater efficiency in train operations.
Earlier Developments • Realizing the important role that information plays in Railways operations, IR had embarked on its Computerization Program, earlier than many other organizations in the country. Towards the end of 60's, two positive developments took place in Indian Railways. • Firstly, even though, computerization was perceived by many as a labor saving measure, IR could realize its potential advantage and the plan to progressively computerize Railways was accepted in principle by Management and the Labor Unions. • Secondly, a dedicated skeletal communication network was developed by IR, as a basic requirement for train operation.
During the beginning of the • 80's IR decided on • Computerization of the Passenger Reservation Arrangement. • Developing a Freight Operations Information System. • Replacing the existing Computers at the Zonal Railways and Production Units with the State-of-the-art Computer systems enabling the organization to computerize more applications and increasing the volume of users. • Provision of Computers at Divisions, New Production units, Workshops, Sheds and Depots and Training Institutes. • Quantum improvement in the use of Computers in the offices. • In the last 10 years, IR has made significant progress in Computerization.
Computerized Passenger Reservation System (PRS) • Out of the total passengers carried by IR, inter-city passengers constitute a mere 9% of the total volume. But, they also bring in a revenue of Rs. 42.9 billion in a total passenger revenue of Rs. 60 billion, constituting roughly 72% of the total. • The customers have been provided with the facility of making their reservation on these trains, 30 days in advance. • The seats/berths reservation system on trains is a fairly complex activity, not only because of volume involving more than 600,000 seats/berths reservations per day, but also because of seven different categories of trains operating, using 72 types of coaches with seven classes of reservation, more than 40 types of quotas and more than 80 kinds of concessional tickets. The method of calculation of fare is also quite complex as charges are based on the distance, comfort level provided and the transit time. • Because of this complexity and sheer volume involved, IR undertook management of Reservation work through computers.
Freight Operations Information System (FOIS) • Indian Railways decided to go in for an integrated computer communication system called Freight Operation Information System (FOIS) with an objective to computerize the information relating to all operational activities and monitor the performance of all activity centers connected with freight traffic management. • FOIS maintains data banks of all fixed and rolling stock assets of the IR with their characteristic features, to help proper evaluation and optimization of their use. • All the data is captured dynamically, as an event is happening. Such data banks are used to improve the quality of decision making and for producing management information reports on all aspects of freight operations, without the need to collect past data, every time.
RAILNET • RAILNET has the potential for transfer of messages, files, e-mails between the important locations on Indian Railways. • In addition, the internal web site in Railway Board and Zonal Railways Headquarters supports codes, manual procedure orders, policy directives and other important information for day-do-day use by various officials.
Tools Provided By Railnet • Email • EDI • WWW • Telnet • FTP • Objectives • Eliminate the need to move paper documents between different offices • Change from ‘Periodic Reporting’ to ‘Information on Demand’ • Expedite & facilitate quick & efficient automatic status update between Railway • Board & Zonal Railways • Capability to monitor & control usage of RAILNET & Internet.
Wipro’s Solution • Wipro developed and deployed the COA application in Madurai and Trivandrum division control offices as a pilot implementation. The solution was later upgraded with components of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, using Visual Studio 2005 with Oracle as Database. The solution is now being rolled out to all 73 control/area offices across India.
Key Benefits • Updated train position is a feature developed by the train charting software in which the train position is updated on a near real-time basis. This would also help avoid manual enquiry at information counters in railway stations. • Establishment of faster and better interfaces with the consumers by streamlining processes and enhancing availability of information.
Conclusion • Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) maintains the two most important Indian Railway web sites, www.indianrail.gov.in and www.trainenquiry.com . • The web site www.indianrail.gov.in provides dynamic information like current PNR status of the passengers, availability of berths in all classes for the next 90 days and static enquiries like Train Between Important Stations, Reservations Rules, Fares, Refund, and Rules etc. • The web site www.trainenquiry.com provides information on the running status of trains arrival/departure, timetable enquiry, special trains etc. • Both these sites collectively attract over 4.5 million users every month. • Audiences visiting these sites are very net savvy and evolved users. The Indian Railways is the largest E-commerce player in India and the above two sites attract a large number of Online Transacting audiences. • The websites are designed to be very efficient, simple and easy for navigation giving users a brilliant and fulfilling experience. • The websites offer attractive advertising opportunities to advertisers and advertising agencies.
BSNL • BSNL is India's oldest and largest Communication Service Provider (CSP).[citation needed] Currently has a customer base of 90 million as of June 2008. • BSNL was India's leading telecom service provider. However it faced tough competition from private players when the telephony market was opened up in late 1990's that eroded its market share and revenues.
Objective • To provide each & every village with a telephone • To encourage development of telecommunication facilities in remote, hilly, tribal areas of the country • To make available affordable & effective communications for the citizens • To expand broadband, leased lines, cellular , WLL services with the state of the art technology
Competition and Strategy • Faced with stiff competition from the private telecom service providers, BSNL has subsequently tried to increase efficiencies itself. • The efficiency of the company has since improved. However, the performance level is nowhere near the private players. The corporation remains heavily unionized and is comparatively slow in decision making and implementation. Though it offers services at lowest tariffs, the private players continue to notch up better numbers in all areas, years after year. • BSNL has been providing connections in both urban and rural areas. • BSNL has also unveiled cost-effective broadband internet access plans (DataOne) targeted at homes and small businesses. At present BSNL enjoys around 60% of market share of ISP services. • BSNL has also launched a Entertainment Portal called BSNL Hungama Portal from where subscribers could download contents like music, music videos for free and also download or play various games online. Only Tamil,Kannada,Telugu & Hindi are provided at present. Hopes are there that the database could be expanded. BSNL charges a fixed monthly subscription fee for this function.
Product • The product is provision of communication service( Basic Telephony, mobile ( CDMA, GSM) technologies, Dedicated leased circuits, Voice over IP, Internet services) • The price is based on the usage charges as per tariff apart from the installation cost. Discounts are offered to heavy callers. • The place of delivery is the customer premises/location. • The promotion very limited till recently. However now logos, brands names for different services, slogans (Connecting India) etc have been coined. Very recently advertisement in the print media as well as television commercials has been released. (www.bsnl.co.in) • The people have a key role to play since it is a service sector. However this is the weakest link in the marketing mix since the monopoly attitudes have hardly changed at the ground level. • The main problem is faced by the company is that it cannot handle its existing customers in an right manner like partly customers are satisfied with the service and partly are still need to be satisfy, this can be done only through taking customer care as main area while segmentation.
Market Segmentation • The Company has identified the high callers or those who make calls worth more than Rs.5, 000/- per month as the high calling segment. This kind of segmentation purely based on the revenue yield alone results in a heterogeneous group of high calling individuals, companies, corporate with inter city presence. Neither has this group been refined further for preferential differentiation nor are any of the measures specified in the customer care specifically targeted towards this group. • BSNL should reward the loyal group by giving strength to their voice. • Try to neutralize the impact of the defector group. • And try to move the Mercenary to the Loyal group.
