How Hindustan Motors Uses ExpressMeet To save Travel and Long-Distance Telephony Costs

Client Profile

Hindustan Motors Limited is one of India’s largest automotive manufacturing companies. Headquartered in Calcutta, HM has major offices and plants in Calcutta, Chennai, Hosur, Pitampur (Indore) and Delhi.

The Business Situation

Hindustan Motors conducts a monthly strategic review meeting of all its manufacturing units/ plants. The review meetings involving unit heads, the strategic planning group and the corporate management is conducted at one of the five manufacturing locations on a rotation basis. Organizing such review meetings involved significant logistics and efforts. Not to speak of the costs of travel for about 15 top-level managers who were required to travel from across the country.

Besides, the travel and the inconvenience every month was a disconcerting factor. Hindustan Motors recognized the need for finding a better way to conduct these review meetings.

ExpressMeet: A practical, simpler alternative

Sify’s suggestion to try ExpressMeet virtual conferencing solution as an alternative met with a hopeful agreement from Hindustan Motors. Sify was also fortunate to find in Mr. Chandran, GM Corporate Affairs a willing patron of this new concept. An initial order for 25 User I.Ds was placed to begin with.

Next, in January ’02, Hindustan Motors set up a live strategic review meeting involving involving all 5 locations. Only, this time, instead of travelling, Hindustan Motors’ top brass simply logged on to the Internet and participated in an ExpressMeet web-conferencing session. Powerpoint presentations were hosted on a live interactive session where 15 senior managers including Chairman, Mr. C K Birla and the M.D, Mr. Shankarnarayanan were present. Prior to the scheduled conference, Sify’s team helped Hindustan Motors set-up the virtual conference.

Roaring Success !

Lasting 425 minutes, the ExpressMeet session was a roaring success. At the end of that single session of ExpressMeet, Hindustan Motors had more than recovered the total cost invested in buying the ExpressMeet service from Sify. To enable more managers and locations to leverage this new technology, Hindustan Motors purchased an additional 32 additional ExpressMeet user licences in March ’02.

Now with voice conferencing enabled, Hindustan Motors is looking to scale up ExpressMeet usage across the organization.