On a Friday night, Mumbai-based Pramod Tripathi, associate area territory manager, Federal Express (FedEx), was looking forward to a relaxed weekend. The relaxation came to an abrupt end though when his phone jangled at 2.30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Tripathi lazily reached out for the phone and soon he was sitting up and reaching for his laptop.

A US-based client was calling about a consignment of T-shirts for a corporate golf tournament in California. It got held up at the customs because of a missing document.

Tripathi went to the customer, took down the consignment number even as he was activating the Virtual Private Network (VPN) client on his laptop to connect to the FedEx network. Once he had logged on to the network, he fed in the consignment number on the cargo-tracking screen and got details of the missing document required by the US customs.

Next he logged on to the consignment database for the document, accessed it and faxed it to the client. At 3:30 a.m., he was back in bed, only to be woken up again at 5:00 a.m. However, this time around, it was just a thank you call!

"Without the laptop and access to the office database via VPN, this would have been impossible," recalls Tripathi. Not impossible perhaps, but it would certainly have required a lot more effort and lost sleep. Tripathi would have had to wake up other staff to open the office, and would have needed to reach office to access the database. In this case, he just had to co-ordinate with the T-shirt manufacturer, who was, in turn, alerted by the client. If he didn't manage to solve the problem quickly, he might have ended up losing a client.

Thankfully, technology is coming to the rescue of people like Tripathi today. All FedEx sales people have been given laptops. Tripathi's incident has only reinforced the company's objective to deploy as many tech tools as possible to help employees enhance performance on the job, or even off it.

Elsewhere, territory managers at Eli Lilly feel their self-esteem has grown after the company sanctioned use of laptops. When they meet doctors, the managers do not have to shuffle through 6 kg of papers comprising drug details and visual aids in an A3-sized folder. It's all on a presentation on a Compaq laptop. Currently, the specialist drug team has 24 laptops.

Nortel Networks has provided laptops to its 100 employees in India. They are in customer support, project implementation and business development. The laptops are loaded with VPN clients and a call pilot, which helps access voice and messages on laptop. Employees connect to the internal systems of the company from anywhere. Access depends on authorisation of the user. Security is enhanced by 128 bit encryption.

Nortel employees carry GPRS-enabled speaker mobile phones. These help in faster data downloads (33 Kbps compared to 9 Kbps on GSM phones) and in conferencing, while on the move. The mobiles help employees establish a dial-up link to the Internet on the laptop, even when there is no Wi-Fi hotspot or a fixed-line phone. The average phone bill of a Nortel employee is Rs 6,000 a month, and the tab is picked up by the company. Says Ravi Chauhan, vice-president (India and Saarc), Enterprise Solutions, Nortel Networks: "It's like sitting in an office even if you are away at a client location.''

Intel also encourage employees to telecommute. Jayant Murthy, general manager (marketing), Intel India, says: "Chip design happens in India, manufacturing in the US, Ireland or Israel and testing in China. Employees have to be in touch with each other and need not be in office to work.''
After the 1,000-odd employees at the company's Bangalore design centre finish work, they can connect with their counterparts around the world on Notebooks. The cafeteria at Intel's Bangalore office is wirefree while its Mumbai office was made wirefree six months back. If the staff were tethered to their offices, it would have been impossible to co-ordinate with teams around the world working in different time zones.

Technology at work might sound like a cliché, but surprisingly its use is pretty low. Nasscom says the IT spend of companies as a percentage of total turnover is less than 1%. And this relates more to new software deployed by the company or implementations like CRM, ERP, database management software, et al. While the basic infrastructure is important, personal tools like laptops, allowing use of messengers, GPRS-enabled mobile phones, wirefree devices, Wi-Fi networks and PDAs enable employees to be connected anytime, anywhere.

A recent Nasscom-IMRB survey found that 40% of the businesses saw an increase in productivity due to IT implementation, while 58% stated that there had been a positive impact but it was difficult to quantify it.

Ask WiproSpectramind (WSM) and they will tell you how much their automated route management system has helped in saving employee and company time, while cutting the annual transport expenditure by Rs 2 crore to Rs 15 crore. Prior to this, the 7,000-people company was at its wits end to manage cab utilisation, on-time arrival and route planning. Even the basic planning on spreadsheets would take 72 hours.

Things changed when WSM installed Baan's RoutePro Software. The software picks up the employee data - location and shift. This co-ordinates with the Eicher City map and generates a time schedule, route plan and the total distance travelled. The company engages 200 vehicles from 11 transporters in Delhi to pick-up about 3,000 employees.

With RoutePro, 97% of the pick-ups are scheduled. The employee also knows when exactly the vehicle will be outside her place and the wait time is no more than five minutes. Apart from time savings (it cuts down planning time to four hours from 72 earlier), this has helped in other ways. Rakesh Sharma, vice-president (infrastructure), WSM, says: "The human body is not at its peak performance if it has to travel for over 120 minutes. Now 40% of the staff comes to work within 90 minutes.''

Once in office, instant messengers (IM) are a boon in responding to customer queries. At WSM's technical help desk whenever a query comes in at the junior agent's desk and he is unable to resolve it, he contacts the senior agent on IM to sort out the problem. The input costs are nil, while by-products include improved quality of service. FedEx uses IM tool Jabber.

Automated HR systems are also in vogue. No more written notes for leave, shift change, compensation and benefits. At www.iniitian.com, NIIT staffers can make travel bookings, know their appraisal status, be informed about their benefits online and discuss things with departments heads. About 1,700-2,000 NIITians use this. WSM calls this I-orbit.

Another feature that WSM offers is a scheduler where employees can put requests to exchange shifts. This is linked to the transport management system, RoutePro. In case of a shift swap, the transporter knows whom to pick and whom to skip. At Johnson & Johnson, myjnjindia.com serves the online HR link to all employees. While Eli Lilly's territory managers report online on the day's work. All the information is summarised by a system called I-call-Drs. This is also where the 400 staffers get their salary details and internal communication. Eli Lilly is planning to hook up to doctors to get feedback on new drugs.

Some initiatives can take a while to convey their usefulness or pitfalls. Take the audio/video back-ups that WSM employees were given recently - a good tool to know the weather in Detroit and the latest happening in the US. But the backend, linked up via Internet news sites failed to live up to expectations. Often agents conveyed concerns about heavy snowfall in Chicago, as shown on the news clips, while it was actually bright and sunny out there, making customers furious.

Also, if you use the call pilot on laptop to access fax, mail or voice messages, make sure that senders keep their messages brief. A huge voice mail can easily block email. Says Chauhan: "There is always a learning associated with new tools. But most often paybacks in terms of time, money and productivity are significant. The use of technology tools will only increase.'' Amen to that.
With reports by Shweta Verma and Gina S. Krishnan.