Asian Paints, India's largest paints company with a turnover of Rs 6,680 crore, managed to raise its profitability and clocked positive revenue growth in FY2009-10. Profitability was up by 100 percent with a growth rate of 20 percent plus. The company did not reel under the recession blues as around 80 percent of its business focused on India alone.

“We had one of the best years for our business last year and this was after a long time,” says Manish Choksi, Chief – Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints.

To keep this momentum of growth, the paints-maker is looking at change in every sphere within the company.

Take the instance of starting a commercial production at its new paint manufacturing facility in Rohtak, Haryana in April this year.

The plant has an initial capacity of 1.5 lakh KL per annum and can be scaled to 4 lakh KL in future expansions. This plant is fully automated. So the time raw materials enter the plant to the time when finished goods leave the factory, there is no manual intervention. “We need such scale and automation in every part of the organisation,” says Choksi.

The challenge for the company is to meet the expectations of service and delivery of customers on various fronts like capacity, raw material procurement and even distribution. Choksi admits that if they miss a day of dispatch or unloading, they really do not have an inbuilt capacity to play catch up.

Looking within
To iron out these issues, Choksi says that the IT within the company is undergoing a process of re-examination. This will look at whether the systems are built in the right manner, and if they have the right business processes and how can they be used in a better and efficient way.

For example, last year the company took a different approach to better its sales order process. Previously, the process was on a central SAP platform. That would mean dealers would call their local sales offices to place orders or the branch sales representatives would take the orders and call the local sales office.

Today, the company has two call centres that do inbound and outbound calling to pick up sales orders. This call centre also handles customer support and service calls including complaints of consumers and dealers.

“So these call centres are doing a large range of activities on a centralised basis. This allows us to have huge scalability,” says Choksi.

The call centre also plays a significant role in project sales. Earlier when the company carried out project sales that involved sales to large building sites, they would typically deliver the material to the dealer who in turn would tell the transporter to deliver the same to various sites. Today the call centre is able to deliver this as a standardised process by proper authentication and verification. “This would not have been possible to manage effectively from a branch location,” says Choksi.

The company has also made changes in its distribution model. They have gone for automatic tracking and retrieval system and have chosen distribution centres that are located near the manufacturing plant. Earlier, these centres were situated far away from the plants.

Continuous flow
Asian Paints is in the process of developing a Business Continuity Planning (BCP) exercise end-to-end. According to Choksi, this is not merely IT disaster recovery (DR) but an exercise that will look and examine all the processes within the company and figure out the possible vulnerabilities that could cause disruptions. The next step is to plan the company and individual response considering various scenarios. This exercise would cover IT, assets (plants and offices) and people.

The first part of this process would be to lay down a strategy and then make the necessary investments to implement the strategy. Choksi says that though technology will play a small part in this process, it will act as a key enabler. So the business units will define the recovery times of various functions, and technology will define how data can be recovered.

“The other key challenge in this kind of exercise is to sustain it. It is easy to do strategy once, implementation once but business changes. So we are not only looking at being more efficient and scaling up but also being more resilient,” says Choksi.

Bringing intelligence
When Asian Paints carried out its ERP implementation, they also looked at a data warehousing strategy for business intelligence (BI).

However, Choksi says that with the amount of information that the company has today, they have not delivered intelligence to its employees in a manner that it can be used for business decision making. “We are doing more on transaction reporting but we need to do more in delivering information for decision making,” he says.

The company is now looking at doing financial consolidation and also looking at business planning in an integrated manner so that it can help its employees deliver financial reporting in a better way. Simultaneously, the company is working out a strategy for business KPI monitoring and reporting.

“We just do not want to provide dashboards but we want this intelligence to be translated into action,” says Choksi.

Choksi is also keen to leverage social networking. He cites examples of companies that use Twitter equivalent micro-blogging technology to find out their daily activities on the field. He says that he would want to set a companywide system to know the activities of his sales force on a regular basis, and get continuous feeds.

These feeds in turn would help in conducting social analytics. The analytics would be able to predict from a conversation that a dissatisfied customer would not buy from the company the next time.

This kind of analytics will certainly help the company where the product purchase cycle is three to five years. Creating touch points with the customers to ensure that they can come back is a challenge that the company wants to overcome.

“So behaviour sentiment analysis is where this world will go. The services industry will be the ones who will be far ahead of this curve,” says Choksi.