Bipin Chaudhary, Head IT- India & GCC, Cinépolis India, elicits company’s focus on cloud migration and automating processes to make them more energy efficient and deliver seamless customer experience. Excerpts from the interaction..
What is your agenda for growth in 2021?
Over the last couple of years, technology and business have come closer. Now the entire world is evolving around technology and in the last 1-2 years people are focusing more on ML-AI to get better customer experience and minimize the human efforts that are required.
Having said that, Covid-19 has given us two opportunities. First, is how we can keep the costs low and second, how we can offer better customer experience.
How has the year 2020 increased focus on technology across your industry?
Barring few companies, most of the organizations across the industries faced challenges in 2020. In fact, majority of the companies in the entertainment industry were not ready for Covid-19. We invested heavily in technology, so our company was quite prepared. Post Covid, we moved towards cashless transactions, touch-less experience for our customers and 100% digital transformation. We were ready for work from home, as our infrastructure and network were ready and security was in place.
What are the scenarios that are likely to impact your industry in 2021?
Entertainment industry has seen the impulsive and disruptive growth of OTT over the last 12 months. The entire industry is bracing to face the challenges posed by OTT platforms. I am seeing increasing focus of security with high customer traction on OTT platforms and as high availability resources of the cinema industry are moving to cloud. High availability requirements of resources and content make security crucial for the entire industry.
Migration from on-premise to cloud is one thing that I see immediately happening. Security enhancement will follow considering the recent attacks.
Further, the industry focus will be more on employee and productivity management in 2021. While the year 2020 was lean on work, 2021 will pose challenges in terms of gaining the pre-Covid pace and ensuring employee productivity, where technology will play a major role.
What are your technology and digital transformation priorities for 2021?
In 2021, we will be launching our new website and app. Machine learning is going to be a part of the mobile application so that we can offer a seamless experience to our customers. We are going to move the entire sales and feedback section on to the website and application. We’ll be providing in-app solutions so that we can reach to the maximum number of customer.
How do you want to leverage on technology to make processes simpler and efficient?
We have our in-house development team for years and we as a company have a really large IT team. Being a global organization, we continuously adopt best practices from one country to another. We don’t believe in removing people, so what we do is remove the extra hours from your day-to-day work and give you time where you can be more productive. We have been translating such manual work into system-driven solutions.
What are the key technologies which you would focus upon in 2021 and beyond?
The primary focus area is migrating to cloud. We will focus on RPA so that we can automate things and also how we can be more energy efficient by implementing different tools and applications.
