Power management

A mom and pop energy storehouse is cracking orders from around the world

Some time last month, Hema Hattangady was joking with a colleague. "Make my day and tell me I don't look a bit older," she said. "You look just great," he responded.

The camaraderie that day, her birthday, was needed more then ever before at Enercon Systems which, despite being safely landlocked in Bangalore's Electronics City, had lost a frontline member to the sea.

Enercon sells sophisticated electrical meters that run on digital signal processors, and the price of expansion into the Indonesian energy measurement devices market had resulted in the tragic death due to the tsunami of a key engineer skilled in business development.

It took an excruciating 10 days before confirmation reached them that the colleague's body had been identified among the dead.

Hema and husband Ashok Hattangady may not have thought expanding business involved losing colleagues, but adversity isn't new to the duo.

In the process, they have made Enercon's products world class, with customers in West Asia, Europe and United States, and learnt what it takes to change from a family run "feudal organisation" to a professionally managed company.

Enercon is still fairly small, held tightly private, mostly by Mumbai-based Indus Ventures Limited, started by former Hindustan Lever chairman T Thomas.

But, "From 1996, when our net worth was wiped out and we hadn't paid any dividend to shareholders in five years, we are now a Rs 40 crore company, profitable and dividend paying for the last seven years."

That was the result of a bold decision to put the growth of the company ahead of tight control.

Growth meant transformation from a tiny supplier of digital voltage stabilisers to a specialist in energy management selling products and services under its own brand.

Most of the Rs 40 crore revenues expected this year will come from sales in India. But the company's 250 staff are gearing up for rapid growth in exports "" Rs 2.5 crore this year, twice what it did last year, estimates M M Bapat, general manager heading business development.

Ashok, an electronics engineer, first from Bangalore and then Austin, Texas, knew quite early he could architect a world class energy measurement device "" one which told users how much power they were using.

Over the years, he and his expanding team also built the software to tell customers how they were using that power.

As customers went through the measure-detect-control process that Enercon recommended, "they started seeing returns on investment in six months to a year", Ashok says.

That's when customers started setting their own targets: Pepsico, for instance, decided to find out if its bottlers could meet a "this many bottles in this much power" target.

Other customers include cement maker Lafarge, Hindustan Lever, Thai Organic & Chemicals, Reliance and the Taj Group of Hotels.

Thomas, whose venture fund invested in Enercon in 1996, had a simple reason: power costs were going up and anyone who could help companies save on energy consistently stood to make money.

"He came looking for us after hearing about us from Alacrity, a Chennai-based firm. Alacrity, after terminating a contract to distribute our voltage stabilisers, had approached him with its own business plan," Ashok recalled.

What Thomas saw was a competent engineer in Ashok who knew what his product could do. And Ashok needed someone who could fund his idea and run his company for him, though that second came to him only after three years in the managing director's hot seat himself.

The conservative family business (it was started by Ashok's father) was yet to realise it had a better managing director in its own daughter-in-law.

Once unshackled from running the business and allowed to do what he loved best, Ashok's technical expertise took over.

He became director of technology development; one energy meter he developed found favour with General Electric, which wanted to sell it under the GE brand.

The trick lay in converting problems into opportunities. When customers failed to easily recognise the letter 'w' in the display of an otherwise excellent meter, Ashok found a way to actually use fewer segments on the display and make the display more appealing in the bargain.

The display problem triggered another thought: an analog display may actually be better. That led to a colour bar, much like the ones above equalisers in music systems, that visually indicated the load on a circuit.

"Thus was born our Digit-an (digital-analogue) series of meters. The same creative process can be used to exceed expectations," he says.

But his proudest project to date is the Elf series, so named for its smallness, designed by a team from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

"It is the world's smallest three-phase power and energy meter," Ashok explains, and comes with a red lid and transparent body instead of the dull black boxes most meters use.

"Europeans we pitched this product to refused to believe it was made in India."

The USP of the company, Ashok says, is that it has built itself into a one-stop shop for customers seeking energy management "" from advice to audits to meters to software that uses the meters as data acquisition devices.

That it also helps customers monitor complex and expensive infrastructure for power usage is surely a bonus.