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Electrification Corporation (REC) is one of the 'navratna'
central public sector enterprises that comes under the Ministry of
Power's Rajiv Gandhi Gramin Vidyut Yojana. Its main objective is to
finance and promote rural electrification projects all over the
country. The organization provides financial assistance to state
electricity boards, state government departments and rural electric
co-operatives for rural electrification projects that are sponsored
by them.
NEED
was a requirement for training the personnel from state electricity
boards (SEBs), distribution companies involved in the formulation and
implementation of RE projects, O&M officers of the power supply
system's right from junior level to senior executives, rural
electric co-operatives and other power utilities/ private power
companies. In India, there are total 83 utilities
(distributioncompanies) which provides electricity across the
country. The idea was to create a portal on which all the training
management modules need to be conducted for the people who are to be
trained. There are two sets of people needed to be trained-one are
the employees of these utilities and second, private partners who are
engaged as franchises.
target was to train 1,75,000 people by the end of 2011. Given the
fact that such a large number of personnel at all levels have to be
trained all over the country, REC was convinced that the only way
they could do it was through the use of web and e- earning
technologies, deployed to deliver and manage the training as well as
the franchisees delivering that training. With this particular
objective in place, a training portal was created and REC is a nodal
agency which created this portal. On this portal, trainings got
conducted. It included setting up an yearly target for training, how
many trainings to be conducted, and how many people needed to be
trained; getting feedback, complaint management, and invoicing. All
these modules were incorporated in the portal.
SOLUTION
evaluating different solutions, REC zeroed on 'e-Xcellerate', an
e-learning application that has been developed by Corpus e-Ready
Solution, The organization believes that e-Xcellerate, which runs on
IBM power servers, would deliver the required functionality. Rohit
Kumar Shipstone, CEO, Corpus e-Ready Solution, said, “The
e-Xcellerate training portal is for national training program of
C&D
employees with online monitoring and management and national
franchisee training program with online monitoring and management. In
addition, e-Xcellerate allows for creation of micro-sites akin to
self service portals for utilities/institutions providing training to
C&D employees and franchisees.”
delivers the following functionalities:
-
Training delivery and
management
for approximately 75,000 group of C&D employees from various
power companies in the country and for approximately 40,000
individual franchisees from various power companies.
-
Managing training for all the
power distribution companies (approximately 100), and around 300
empaneled training institutes.
-
collaboration platform for distribution companies (utilities), C&D
employees, REC, its training institute CIRE at Hyderabad and other
third party training providers.
-
The data captured and
disseminated relates to training providers, utilities, training
institutes, profile and data of trainees, their training feedback,
claims raised by training providers, including its online processing,
based on successful delivery of training program. General features of
e-Xcellerate includes executive dashboards for Ministry of Power, REC
officials, and utilities heads; upgradeable/customizable to include
other capacity building and HRD initiative/other features that may be
introduced in future; provides content management system (CMS);
amenable to download/access all the relevant data of MIS on mobile
phone, desktop, laptop, palmtop formatted for PDA; multi-lingual
support.
OF THE TRAINING PROCESS
“
works in 3 parts-one part is learning management system which is
essentially a very advanced e-learning delivery system or solution,
second part is training management wherein a person can be tracked
not only when the training is going on but also after the training is
over in terms of his performance, etc. Both these parts create a
complete ERP. However, these two parts are implemented separately so
that if someone just wants the e-learning module, they can go for it
and the same applies for the training management system as well. And
if anyone wants both, they can go for both the modules as well,”
added Rahul Wadhawan, director, Corpus e-Ready Solution.
the launch of this portal, one has the access to the pre-training
material which helps him in preparing for the training. Then he goes
through the actual training process wherein there is an instructor on
the portal who will open a virtual classroom and he would take all
the participants through the material step by step. It is an
interactive classroom, where the sessions can be recorded, and the
students can get answers for any of their queries at the end of the
sessions. Post that, the students can have access to all the
materials, which have been covered, for revision. The system also
enables students to have peer-to-peer discussions and chat amongst
the group that was present during a particular training session. “We
also have to see who was the person who has been trained, what he is
being trained on, where the training will be utilized, etc.
the person has gone through the training procedure, he will have to
finally prepare for the certification. The system has a very strong
electronic delivery platform for the content, eedback, and
conversation platform for the students and the instructors, and
administrative platform wherein one needs to administer after the
training is over so as to ensure whatever training has been given is
fully utilized. It also helps in monitoring the trainers/faculties,
looking after their payments, etc,” asserted Wadhawan.
IN THE WAY
project started a year and half back. It was not much of a challenge
for Corpus to deal with REC, as the ISV has been working very closely
with the government sector. “Being a government focused
organization, we understand their language, need, etc. But yes, it is
totally a different set of environment when you work with a
government body as compared to a private sector. Government is very
clear in their objectives in terms of what they want. Ministry of
Power and REC officials were very clear intheir motive. It was a
smooth case,” said Shipstone. He further iterated, “IBM helped
us a lotin between in terms of providing the right hardware
infrastructure. Infrastructure has to be secure and reliable when you
have to train such a large number of people. Initial testing and
integration of services support by IBM helped us a lot. IBM power
series servers swung this deal for us. Once the application got
developed and it was put on the power platform, REC officials as well
as other stakeholders got satisfied.”
one major challenge that Corpus faced on the REC front was the
translation of the technology into the end deliverables in such a
fashion that it does not become a technological jargon for the end
customers. So, the ISV's effort was to convert all the jargon into
a plain language which was understandable by the REC and government
officials. “REC was very clear on the end deliverables. At the
different levels, there were different requirements. One has to
understand that at the top level of the Ministry, the requirements
are totally different like MIS and they were not keen on knowing how
the training is getting conducted. In the initial meetings, it came
down very clearly that by bridging the gap of the technology and end
deliverables, we will have a smooth sailing,” highlighted
Shipstone.
“
far as the performance of the portal is concerned, it is absolutely
smooth. All the initial hiccups have been sorted out. Around 68,000
people have already enrolled for it. No issues on the support front.
We are able to keep our commitment on the service level agreement.
Internet connectivity in the remote areas of the country, is still a
bottleneck,” added Wadhawan.