Executive summary of bharti airte management essay

Bharti Airtel is India’s one of the many leading service providers of telecommunications. It primarily operates from India and it has its headquarters in New Delhi, India. They have about 24, 500 employees. The company provides mobiles, wire-line, broadband and television services. It is also involved in passive telecom infrastructure services through its subsidiary. Bharti Airtel had 93. 9 million customers for mobile services and 2. 7 million for telemedia services by the end of financial year 2009. At the end of financial year 2009, bharti airtel had recorded revenues of INR 373, 520. 8 million ($8, 150. 2 million), an increase of 38. 3% over 2008. High growth in customer base was primarily the reason in the increase in revenues. Bharti Airtel’s operating profit was INR 103, 219. 3 million ($2, 252. 2 million) in financial year 2009 (FY 2009), 36% increase over 2008 and its net profit was INR 78, 589. 5 million ($1, 714. 8 million) in financial year 2009, 22. 9% increase over 2008. (Datamonitor, 2010)

Key Facts:

Head Office

Bharti Airtel Limited

Aravali Crescent

1 Nelson Mandela Road

Vasant Kunj

Phase II

New Delhi 110 070

India

Phone

91 11 4666 6100

Fax

91 11 4666 6411

Web Address

http://airtel. in

Revenue / turnover

( INR )

373, 520. 8

Financial Year End

March

Employees

24, 538

Bombay Stock Exchange ticker

532454

Introduction

History of Bharti Airtel

Sunil Bharti Mittal is the founder of the Bharti Group. In 1983, Sunil Mittal went into an agreement with Germany’s Siemens to manufacture the company’s push-button telephone models for the Indian market. In 1986, Sunil Bharti Mittal incorporated Bharti Telecom Limited (BTL) and his company became the first company in India to offer push-button telephones, establishing the basis of Bharti Enterprises. This first-move advantage allowed Sunil Mittal to expand his manufacturing capacity elsewhere in the telecommunications market. By the early 1990s, Sunil Mittal’s were the first company to have launched fax machines and cordless telephones in India . In 1992, Sunil Mittal build a cellular phone network in Delhi after having won a bid. In 1995, Sunil Mittal developed the cellular operations as Bharti Tele-Ventures and launched service in Delhi. In 1996, Airtel’s cellular service had reached Himachal Pradesh. In 1999, Bharti Enterprises acquired the stacks of JT Holdings, and extended its cellular operations to Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. In 2000, Bharti bought control of Skycell Communications (in Chennai). In 2001, the company reached Kolkata acquiring control of Spice Cell. In 2002, Bharti Airtel went public, and the company was listed on Bombay Stock Exchange and National Stock Exchange of India. In 2003, the Bharti cellular phone operations was branded under the single Airtel brand. In 2004, Bharti acquired stacks at Hexacom in Rajasthan. In 2005, Bharti’s network reached to Andaman and Nicobar.

In 2009, Airtel launched its first international mobile network in Sri Lanka. In 2010, Airtel began operating in Bangladesh and 16 African countries.

Today, Airtel is the largest cellular service provider in India and fifth largest in the world.

Information knowledge Management in Bharti Airtel

What Knowledge Management (KM) Means For Bharti

At bharti airtel, Knowledge management is all about what knowledge management does for business results and building an organizational environment of unconstrained sharing & replication of knowledge.

For Bharti KM is a step to successfully achieve its Business objective better & faster – through an integrated set of initiations , systems and behavioral interventions – to encourage smooth sharing of knowledge related to the business and to remove re- invention.

Why Bharti Embarked On A Formal KM Program

At Bharti airtel it is believed that if Knowledge management is effectively deployed then it could be a powerful enabler of :

Reducing variation in performance across business units by maintaining good customer experience.

Speeding up business results by removing reinvention.

Each individual employee is given the power to collectively influence and control the knowledge of the entire organization in serving customers.

To be able to re-use individual knowledge into organizational knowledge – to the extent possible.

Key Enablers Of KM At Bharti:

Bharti has seven categories of enablers for KM – strategic focus, alliance with business, Knowledge Management organization, Knowledge Management processes, KM culture, KM content-quality and technology. Their initiatives under each categories are described below:

1. Strategic Focus

The biggest enabler for Bharti Airtel is the focus and sincerity of top management and high expectations from Knowledge Management. KM ranks fifth out of the company’s top ten strategies known to achieve the company’s business objectives over the next four to five years time span. KM and its results form an important part of monthly business reviews, and of all the important management communications.

KM-specific measures include Performance appraisals at all levels. The company has

institutionalized KM awards for President’s and CEO’s.

2. Alignment with business objectives

KM and its results are always on the list of items on the President’s business reviews with CEOs of individual business unit and CEOs’ reviews within their units. Mr. Manoj Kohli, President, Bharti Cellular, identified three strategic business imperatives – Customer Delight, Revenue

Enhancement and Productivity / Value Maximization. A set of top priority business measures has been build. It was ensured that each top priority measure maps with at least one of the President’s three strategic imperatives – otherwise, it wouldn’t be on the top priority list.

Airtel’s knowledge-map is based on our business process map, and critical measures under each process – which helps them, ensure that all KM initiatives are structured and focused around critical business processes. According to President, Mr. Badri Agarwal, Bharti Infotel, “ KM for us is not fashion, but a serious tool to achieve our business objectives with maximum speed and zero re-invention”. In terms of impact on these top priority business measures, when measured, are the results of KM. Their KM initiative is very clearly focused on knowledge replication with quantified and demonstrated results on critical business measures.

3. KM Organization and Roles

Bharti Airtel has developed KM coordinators centrally and at an individual business unit. These people act as a catalysts in the KM process. They are change agents who bring about change and spread the culture of knowledge sharing across the organization. They inspire other employees and bring about the process of sharing and replicating knowledge and measuring the results. They also have communities of experts headed by knowledge champions. They co-operate and spread knowledge sharing, replication and performance improvement in their own area of specialization, with necessary support and help from the KM coordinators.

4. Standard KM Processes

They are institutionalizing standardized, close-looped processes for knowledge sharing, replication and measurement of outcomes. Knowledge-sharing and replication of knowledge sharing help improve performance on critical business measures that will no longer be a matter of chance or choice, but a compulsory activity like any other business process.

5. Culture and People Engagement

To create an organization-wide culture of knowledge-sharing and replication and to institutionalize KM at Bharti Airtel, it is important for every employees to be involved in KM activities, and not just a few of their employee base. To help them keep track of this, they are putting in place a measurement of “ employee engagement in KM”. Each month, the percentage of employees in every business unit and in every critical business process who have been part of knowledge replication initiative or a knowledge sharing session or at least one knowledge submission to the company knowledge base, will be measured and reported. This will be included in regular business reviews of Bharti Airtel.

6. Quality of Content in Knowledge Repositories

Content quality is measured in two steps. Firstly, all content submitted are scanned by a member of the KM team to ensure relevance to the business, quality of documentation and related to the standard KM formats. Then the content goes to the knowledge champion and community of experts who “ own” the concerned knowledge repository. They finally review the content and approve it for publishing, or edit or reject it if necessary. Having a standardize documentation formats for knowledge sharing, replication and knowledge-sharing sessions helps them maintain quality and objectivity of the content. These standards are also a part of the KM orientation training, which a many employees have gone through.

7. Technology Enablement

For Them, KM is not about technology. But, they have adopted technology as a powerful enabler for KM. Their Knowledge Portal Gyan Bharti on the corporate Intranet is a common virtual platform for all employees to share knowledge and replication. It consists of repositories of re-usable organizational knowledge structured around critical business processes. It helps them to unit experts in each of these processes into communities, and facilitates co-operation among members of these communities. It automatically allots K$ to all employees, and lets them check their K$ balance and transactions as well.