How did Abhishek Chatterjee from SPJIMR bag the ASSOCHAM Energy Excellence Award?

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Being passionate about technology and innovation, I have always challenged myself to the existing norms, both in my personal and professional life. I started my career with Kolkata’s power utility, CESC Limited, an RP-SG flagship company with 8000 Crore annual revenue. I was offered a PPO from the organization during my engineering after I completed the summer internship with them. Here is an excerpt of my journey that inspired me to drive efficiency and bag ASSOCHAM Energy Excellence Award.

During my initial days in my first organization, my job spanned across various domains starting from business transformation, operations, and IT projects. After being introduced to the Metering department, I noticed that a particular high-impact process chain, the whole meter inspection process, had scopes of improvement. 

Meter inspectors would go for their respective jobs after being allocated jobs by hand on a piece of paper. On arriving at the field location, they would note down their observations and relevant calculations on paper, only to return to the office to enter those into a data entry portal. Again, their superiors would have to check their inspection results and make decisions. All these processes, from issuing the job to an inspection to taking a decision on the results took more than 48 hours on average. Moreover, the whole process was manual, paper-based, and thus inefficient and error-prone in nature.

Finding space to improve: Leveraging technology to drive efficiency

Envisioning a chance to enhance the process dramatically and having a true passion for reducing stress on the environment, I took the lead of my team and we designed and coded a whole framework with an Android application and integrated it seamlessly with the existing system. 

The app was completely framed with location guidance, calculation modules, and photo upload features for future references. The meter inspectors were allotted a mobile device for their work, where they received work notifications instantly. They could complete their total job flow within the app and send the observations back to the office immediately after finishing each job. The back-office systems were developed to provide supervisors access to these instant incoming jobs  to check and approve the quality of the jobs. 

In this measure-analyze-improve-control-based endeavor to make the process chain lean, I led a team of only three engineers in managing the project and the job before us was huge. It took us almost six months to automate and digitize the process end-to-end. 

Earning the crown of ASSOCHAM Energy Excellence Award

The transformation resulted in an improvement of the meter inspection cycle time by almost 54%, saving man-hour by 68%, and of course, saving a great amount of paper leading the organization a step forward towards becoming greener. 

Manual errors reduced to zero, eliminating the need for reassessment of the inspections. The impact of this project was such that it was nominated and ultimately declared the ‘Champion of Energy Excellence Awards 2018’ in the category of Innovation in Energy Solutions, which is a prestigious national award given away every year by ‘The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India’ or ASSOCHAM, the topmost trade association of India. 

The project was also featured as a white paper in the summer 2018 edition of 'Eclectic', a journal for engineering professionals. This whole event, besides being a major organizational success, bolstered my confidence in my abilities to manage people and resources and handle large, impactful projects.

The story would remain incomplete without the mention of the cooperation and help I received from my superiors and colleagues. It was a transformation project aimed at holistic improvement of a critical and complex operation chain and the team's success left us all elated. 

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