“We focus on empowering our channel relationships”–Amitava Biswas

How well has the process automation space progressed in the last couple of years and what is the future outlook of this market?
The overall automation market has seen consistent growth over the last 2 years. As per the market reports, many automation products and suppliers witnessed a considerable growth in the last couple of years. Emerging as a strong market after China and Japan, the overall growth of industry in India has created enormous demand for automation products and systems.
Moreover, increasing pressure from globalization is driving process manufacturers to improve plant performance in ways that would be inconceivable without modern process automation systems and business processes. While globalization expands opportunities for these manufacturers, it also intensifies the challenges they face-they need to act quickly and with agility to emerging market opportunities, and improve financial performance, all while dealing with competing for limited skills and talents in the industry.

What does HPS stand for in the partner ecosystem today? What makes you successful among the channel community? Where do you want to take this perception to in FY13?
At Honeywell, we are committed to and are recognized for our continuous drive in helping partners grow their business, investing in partner competency and loyalty. We have partners with whom, we share long standing relationships and this has been possible through a strong collaborative approach focused on winning together in the market place, ensuring that channel profitability is maintained, and consistent investments are made in skill set development.

We ensure that our channel base is empowered to grow their business by giving them a wide and reliable product portfolio, right training and prompt sales service back-up. Over the last 3 years, our efforts in widening partner opportunities have resulted in increasing our channel network and engagement to a large extent. Moving forward, we plan to further strengthen our channel business processes to make it more robust. We will continue to expand partner prospects and offer sustainable opportunities that will enable them to grow exponentially.

Could you articulate your channel strategy?
At Honeywell, we work on a simple philosophy ‘grow with your partners', therefore, we make sure that we align our objectives with our partner's business objectives and work with them very closely to achieve it.
We focus on enhancing channel relationships across markets and empowering channels with the right portfolio, training and service back-up to be able to sell our product line. We are careful in the selection of partners and look for partners who are focused, have strong business acumen, and are interested in long-term partnerships. We also continuously advance our product offerings and pass on the product innovations to partners for taking these to the customers. Honeywell has a strong brand recall owing to product reliability and unique products offerings which in turn enables associated channel partners to succeed in the market.

What's the criterion for selecting resellers and distributors?
The selection criterion for resellers and distributors primarily includes selecting partners who trade in the field, process instruments and control systems market. Customer relationship, ability to sell products techno commercially, superior project management skills and working capital management are other areas considered during the selection process.
Creation of market for our resellers and distributors through an effective business development function is also one of the important strategies to grow channel business. At the same time, setting an operations organization to support resellers/distributors and ensure compliance with Honeywell standards is also critical to success.

What are your partner-focused programs for this year?
To reaffirm the importance of partner contribution to our business, we host our Indian region partners at an annual conference where we celebrate success, acknowledge their efforts, share our business strategy, and hear feedback and expectations from them. We recently concluded this conference in March this year.
In 2012, we will continue to evolve our systems and processes to bring in execution efficiency and roll out specific plans that will reward performers and provide necessary support to channels.

Going forward, what are your key priorities, direction, and focus areas for 2012?
We believe in extensive partner training as they are our key touch points with customers. Customers have multiple options to choose from and are being very prudent in their purchases. This makes it increasingly important for the channel to build strong customer relationship and ensure customer satisfaction by making both pre and post-sales experience enriching for customers. In 2012, we plan to enhance the channel product portfolio through new product launches and arrange for virtual and on-site training sessions on these products and services.

Through special applications and marketing engineers, we plan to start interacting with end-users to understand their ‘pain matrix' (challenges, needs, benefits) and offer corresponding solutions that would also create a market for the channel to grow. We are continuously striving to empower our channel partners in a holistic manner, which we believe will enhance their outreach to our end-customers in all target regions across India and other Saarc countries.