Maximum Business Impact : Mudra Communications : One View

The company that started operations in 1980 with a single brand, Vimal, has

today become one of the most admired marketing communications networks in India;

managing over 125 brands, and having a turnover that exceeds Rs 15 billion.

Naturally, IT has been a key ingredient in helping Mudra achieve such remarkable

growth. Most of Mudra's IT applications infrastructure runs on Open Source

software, and even more interestingly, most of it has been developed in-house.

This comprises around 20 different business applications right from ERP and

accounting to HR, asset management, an application to track and identify new

business opportunities (called the Lighthouse by Mudra).

Sebastian Joseph Executive VP & Head Technology Q All of Mudra's business applications have been developed inhouse using Open Source software. Considering that the Open Source world has a plethora of applications already available for just about every requirement, why did Mudra decide to develop everything inhouse? We started our open source journey in 2001. At that point of time, availability of open source applications were limited. Moreover, there were many features /functional limitations with the available solutions. Q Specifically, why was One View developed in-house vs purchasing a ready-made commercial software that could provide business intelligence and decision support? One of the key features we required was to have a simple, intuitive yet powerful UI. The application was mainly aimed at senior management and commercial heads. Flash was the obvious choice. Unfortunately none of the BI tools had Flash interface (We did evaluate Pentaho, an open source BI tool). Secondly, the level of customization required was on the higher side. We required flexibility in providing a granular access control at KPI as well as data level. QWhat's the way forward for One View? Having developed a common framework, we are now in the process of extending this to customized functional requirements. A CTO One View is under implementation that caters to the KPIs for Technology function. Similarly a CFO One View is under design that caters to specialized/customized KPIs for the CFO. This is also being extended to the Media function.

With so many applications, there was bound to be a lot of complexity. So much

so that it had actually started hampering the productivity of Mudra's SBU heads

who were using these applications. Most information that these executives

required for making decisions were scattered across all these business

applications. As a result, they had to access each application separately to

pull out the required information. For instance, they would extract manpower

summary details from the HR system, client wise PNL data through the time sheet

and accounting system, etc. So before every business review meeting, the SBU

heads had to rely solely on respective commercial heads to pull out the key

performance indicators relevant to their businesses. On an average, it used to

take 5 man days to compile KPIs per SBU; and if a particular executive was

handling multiple SBUs, then the time to compile data went up even further. The

data had to be manually extracted and then consolidated in Excel sheets. At any

time, if more information was required, then the process took even longer. Not

only did this entire exercise waste a lot of time, but there were also questions

on the accuracy of the data itself, as it was compiled manually. More time was

spent identifying and fixing errors in information during meetings, instead of

making strategic decisions. There was a dire need for deploying an application

that could do all this work automatically, and in real-time. Thus emerged Mudra

One View.

One View provides single window view to pre-defined KPIs like billing, revenue, expenses, profits, etc. All this happens in real time with a few mouse clicks.

The implementation



Mudra One View is a dashboard application that provides pre-defined key
performance indicators (KPIs) in a single consolidated window to key users. It

queries underlying business applications and provides a summarized single view

of the required information. Currently some of the information it can display

includes profit summary, billing, revenue, expenses and profits before tax;

collections, outstanding, estimates (business committed), manpower analysis,

client wise PNL, capex and IT assets deployment. All information is shown at a

macro level by default, which users can drill into and get more information.

Access rights have been defined for every user, based on which one could view

information for a particular SBU, multiple SBUs, or the entire organization.

What's more, all information can be viewed as graphs or in a grid format.

There's also the provision to extract data to Excel or a hard copy format.

The solution has been built using Flex, the open source framework from Adobe.

It's a framework to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). These can be

deployed on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. The framework

provides a standards-based language and programming model that supports common

design patterns. It uses MXML, a declarative XML-based language to describe the

UI layout and behaviors. Plus, there's ActionScript 3, an object-oriented

programming language to create the client logic. Flex includes a rich component

library with more than 100 extensible UI components for creating RIAs.

Benefits



SBU heads at Mudra can now extract relevant info accurately on their own,
thereby speeding up decision making. The organization has 12 SBUs, and if the

application saves each SBU 5 man days per month, then it works out to a total

annual saving of 720 man days. If we assume an annual average CTC and 300 man

days pa (25 man days p.m. x 12 months), then the annual saving is Rs 36 L. This

is apart from savings in opportunity costs, flexibility, accuracy of information

and the time costs of SBU heads.