Wipro plans a fresh shot at a ‘Quantum’ digital leap

BENGALURU: Wipro, which missed last year’s deadline for its internal digital transformation, is expected to operationalise it across departments this year, company executives told ET.

The Bengaluru-headquartered software services exporter had planned for Quantum — as the project is known — to go live across all departments by August last year, sources privy to the matter told ET.

Wipro is trying to create a global identity for itself as a digital technology services provider.


Quantum, initiated after an external audit, includes transformation of various processes and operations across finance, sales, delivery, human resources and other departments.

For example, the company has made a single process of employee onboarding across all geographies.

“The company has so far invested heavily on implementation of SAP HANA applications across departments. This has seen sluggish growth across the organisation. While the finance department under (CFO) Jatin Dalal has taken a lead, other departments are seeing slow growth,” one of the people, who did not want to be named, said.

Quantum is meant to closely appraise the size of teams across departments and bring in technology to speed up operations.

Analysts, however, said such transformations were not easy and that change management creates challenges more than technology.

“...It (slow progress) is not unusual….what Wipro is finding out is that it is not the technology that creates the problem, but the change management,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, chief executive officer of Everest Group, a global IT advisory and research firm.

“I see this as a typical digital transformation, and a great learning for Wipro,” he added.

Responding to ET’s queries, Wipro CFO Dalal said that the company has implemented Quantum phase-wise, with three to four large “sprints” done in 2019, and that it would go live this year.

“We realised that digital was growing leaps and bounds and we felt the need to transform internally. With that in view, we embarked on Quantum to create a significantly simplified work flow...,” he said.

“At the end of 2018 we made a real decision and it started delivering its earliest sprint (outcome) in January 2019. We have delivered three or four large sprints (in 2019) and in 2020, we will have three to four more,” Dalal added.

Many organisations are grappling with such shifts, said Ray Wang, chief analyst and founder of Constellation Research.

“I believe every organisation is grappling with (changes such as) when do you provide intelligent automation, when do you augment a machine with a human, when do you augment the human with a machine, when do you trust human judgment. This is not an easy process in digital transformation. What Wipro has is a strong offering in Holmes (a new-age technology-enabled platform) that is being applied to internal projects. This is not an easy project to complete,” he said.