'The Indian market potential has not been explored to the fullest'

Zebra sees huge potential in the Indian market and has chalked out few big initiatives to expand business in India. They also plan to hire more sales and technical people so that they not only reach to businesses in the metros, but also to the ones based out of other tier 1 cities too. Andrew Tay, APAC President, Zebra Technologies, shares Zebra's India strategy with Arshiya Khan

What are Zebra's product and service offerings for the Healthcare sector? What will be your core competency in the Life sciences and Pharma sector?

Zebra Technologies, with more than 40 years in the business and having international presence of operating in nearly 100 countries around the world is a global leader in providing innovative technology solutions to healthcare organizations which helps improve patient safety, comfort and efficiency at every stage of a patient's journey through the hospital. Bar codes and, more recently, RFID (radio frequency identification) accurately identify patients, medications, samples, staff assets, treatments, lab results, and records provide the foundation for improving quality and patient care.

Zebra printers are complimented with applications software to automate both clinical and back-office processes. With these in place, healthcare facilitates can streamline workflow to significantly improve productivity and business costs. It will also help achieve enhanced visibility into real time data needed to deliver high-quality patient care and efficiently run the complex operations of a hospital and health network.

To ensure all activity begins and ends with quality and accurate data, Zebra has the wide offering of products for the healthcare sector, our HC 100 patient ID solution produce on-demand barcoded antimicrobial-coated, durable wristbands that can accurately identify patients since admission and help nurses or administrators to easily change the ribbon by putting another cartridge in place.

This is a definitely a product you can plug and play rather than "plug and pray". In addition, the ZM400 and G-series printers help add variable data to every drug at the unit-dose level enabling correct administration to protect patients and streamlining work process. Administrators can can now immediately label blood or specimen at patient bedside with QL200 plus mobile printers, thereby reducing errors and increase efficiency by eliminating manual data entry.

What are the characteristics that will drive growth at Zebra?

Zebra Technologies relies on quality, reliability and innovation to provide the best products and services for its customers. By adapting to the rapidly changing technological needs and continually improving as well as introducing new business solutions, Zebra is at the forefront of addressing evolving industry standards, growing distribution channels and changing customer demands.

Backed with the strong brand name, Zebra provides the broadest range of innovative technology solutions which provides one-stop-shop for customers to avail business solutions on their requirements to identify, track, and manage the deployment of critical assets for improved business efficiency. This eliminates the interoperability issue faced by customers engaging with different vendors.

How does technology play an important role in the Healthcare sector?

Like any other industry, the Healthcare sector is also continuously focusing on improving quality of medical care for patients; streamline operations while simultaneously reduce errors and the cost of doing business.

With a focus on operational excellence, healthcare organizations are realizing the importance of implementing RFID and Barcode technology, which could play important role in addressing key issues like ever increasing patient population, lack of skilled manpower and growing cost. Technology has become a key factor in defining success for healthcare organizations and companies like Zebra Technologies are well equipped to provide custom-made technology solutions. I also believe that adopting a uniform standard for RFID will lower cost of implementation thus increase the adoption of these technologies in the Healthcare sector.

The Healthcare sector is witnessing benefits of some important technology implementations like:

1) Provide remote and real time tracking of critical medical devices which are often expensive and sophisticated, this saves valuable staff time resulting in better utilization of resources.

2) These technologies also help keep track of patients, minimize medical errors like checking the right drug consumed and inform patients on their schedule, reduce complicated paperwork, avoid human errors which results in increased efficiency of hospital administration.

3) Wireless technology can also help in preventing drug counterfeiting, where RFID and Barcode tags can help in tracking drugs in an attempt to tackle counterfeiting.

What is your strategy for growth in India? Roll out faster and newer products in the market?

Zebra has launched its 'PartnerFirst' program in India in July. We presently have 81 (2 distributors and 79 Resellers) partners who are part of this program that aims to increase profitability and drive discipline in terms of channel management, which in turn will ensure that our customers will be very satisfied. Zebra has also moved its manufacturing from the US to China in the recent one and a half years. Which means the research and development has also shifted to this part of the globe. In the next 18 months, products will have features catering to the needs of Asian customers. Zebra is working towards it on providing customers with high quality products at an affordable price.

What are future plans with regards to new product development, expansion and joint ventures?

Zebra sees huge potential in the Indian market and has chalked out few big initiatives to expand business in India. We plan to hire more sales and technical people so that they not only reach to businesses in the metros but also to the ones based out of other tier 1 cities too. We also plan to expand the industry verticals we cater too. Though we mainly focused on the manufacturing industry, in the last three years we managed to successfully penetrate into other vertical as well. These include healthcare, government, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), transport & logistics sectors and more.

We would expand base of resellers and channel partners who have the knowledge of other business domains. Through our PartnersFirst program we enable our channel partners to qualify for a lot of schemes, incentives, training and support to help them penetrate in to various industries.

Zebra is working towards providing high quality products having features catering to the needs of Asian customers at an even more affordable price.

What are your expectations from the Indian market and how is the market set to change?

We believe the Indian market potential has not been explored to the fullest and provides us with many opportunities for business growth. The India market is a strategic location in our global plans and to achieve our India vision, we plan to expand our presence and offerings to our customers in India by focusing on the six new high growth vertical with broad range of product offering in the Healthcare sector. We look forward to providing innovative and high quality product portfolio to cater to the growing demands for AIDC products from the Indian organizations and expect to generate at least 10 percent of the company's APAC revenues in the next two years from the region. At present, the India office contributes five-six percent of the APAC revenues. Also, in the long run, we expect the India operation to contribute half the Zebra China revenues (at present China contributes 50-55 percent of APAC revenues).

arshiya.khan@expressindia.com