The advertising vertical is a niche industry and one does not see much in terms of product and solution offerings for this space. As a result leading players in this space are left to dabble in technology for themselves and take the home-grown route on most occasions.  There are several examples where advertising agencies have developed their own solutions to cater to their needs. one such example is the Mudra group, which embarked on this journey in 2001 and is now reaping the benefits.

With a new brand identity and diversified business units, the group has successfully completed over 30 years in the industry. Technology continues to play a key role at any organisation in realising its goals. The Mudra group too resorted to technology to achieve increased efficiency, streamline its processes and align its business goals with the delivery systems. mBoss (Mudra Branch operations Support System), the flagship product of the group has been at the core of this.

mBoss is the operations and accounting business application of the group that has been developed in-house and continues to be supported by the in-house team.

According to Sebastian Joseph, President Technology & fm, Mudra group, “mBoss  is a comprehensive web-based integrated accounting and operations system covering all the branding and communications offerings—mainline advertising (press & TV), digital media, out-of-home solutions, strategy & design consulting, Localisation & pre-media services, content creation, interactive & new media, data driven marketing services, health & lifestyle communication,  retail designing & visual merchandising, navigation solutions, promotional marketing, field force management, trade marketing, bottom of the pyramid marketing, sports marketing, integrated events management, youth marketing —making it one of its kind in the advertising vertical. The system is deployed across multiple companies and Strategic Business units (SBUs) spread across multiple locations.”

The group earlier had an accounting and operation system in UNIX and Ingres for major locations and Clipper based system for smaller branches. The corporate office had a separate accounting system in UNIX. None of these systems could talk to each other. “on a monthly basis, only the header information was brought in from respective locations and merged with the Corporate system. in short, all the systems were running in silos,” expressed Sebastian.

A web-based solution
In 2001 management decided to take a re-look at the existing IT infrastructure. The entire IT landscape was re-drawn keeping in view the future growth agenda. This is when the company decided to go in for an integrated product that could address the business needs. After considerable evaluation of various off the shelf products it was decided to take the build route rather than the buy route. Sebastian shared, “The primary reason was lack of product fitment and high level of customisation (around 65%) required for the existing products. The next step was to decide on the overall architecture to be adopted. The first selection was the RDBMS. Ingres was the obvious choice since we were already an Ingres shop. After numerous discussions with the vendor, industry feedback and our own study we were not confident about their roadmap. Hence we zeroed in on oracle.”

Next was the operating System (OS) selection. The users were all sworn UNIX fans. RISC architecture was vanishing. After a lot of deliberation, the choice was narrowed down to LINUX. Having achieved this the development architecture was narrowed down to Java (J2ee). Crystal report was the default choice for report development. “However, at that point of time, Crystal did not support LINUX. We found a third party software that allows rendering of crystal reports on the LINUX platform, “added Sebastian.

The development journey began in mid 2001. The system initially addressed Accounts receivable, Accounts Payable, general ledger and MIS on the accounting front. Client Servicing, Press, TV, outdoor, Studio were covered on the operations front. With the business growth, newer modules such as radio, internet, Trade marketing, Direct marketing, etc. were added.  Sebastian shares, “This is a completely web-based model – anytime any where access. Whenever we look at adding any additional physical location to the business, all we need to take care of is only the basic physical infrastructure. There is nothing on the technology front that needs to be additionally set up as one just needs an internet connection to have the new location up and running in a jiffy.

Challenges faced
Change is a way of life but change is not always welcome. Sebastian opined, “Challenges were plenty, users knew about 40 percent of what they required. The user requirements received were half baked. IT team had to burn the midnight oil debating on the user inputs and stretch them to create possible scenarios. Since they were not exposed to other systems their thinking was single track. Best practices being followed in the industry vertical was not known.”

In 2001, Java resource was a scarce commodity. So was the case with open source. On the implementation front, the team faced immense mind-set issues. User acceptance thus became a challenge. One thing that did work in the company's favour was the UI. The earlier system was in character mode whereas the new system had a graphical user interface. Then came the huge task of migration that was an even bigger challenge. Sebastian expresses, “We had to do extensive hands-on support to the users. The business logic also underwent changes at the time of implementation. We came across business cases that differed from location to location for the same activity.”

The system was developed in-house and proved to be extremely cost effective as the investment was well within 20 percent of a SAP or any other similar implementation for a like to like enterprise.

Sebastian opined, “The maintenance cost is also negligible as compared to what a similar enterprise would end up paying as ATS or AMC charges to SAP or other similar solution annually.”

Key benefits
The web-based feature of the solution was the one which truly gave the solution its due credit. According to Sebastian, other benefits included implementation of unified accounting practices, integration of all transactions, effective control, and the flexibility to take care of different business cases, etc. Due to a centralised web based infrastructure anywhere anytime access became a reality and security could now be centrally controlled. in terms of resource utilisation also the group witnessed a significant change. There was an efficient utilisation of manpower and computing resources.

Constant upgrades
Since the start of this initiative in 2001, there have been constant feature upgrades. "Apart from tight integration with other business applications, our business has gone through major growth. From a few companies/SBUs it has grown into multiple companies, multiple SBUs, multiple locations, multiple business verticals," Sebastian opines. mBoss caters to both the accounting and operations requirements for the entire Mudra group across all companies, SBUs, locations and business verticals.

Road ahead
According to Sebastian, “The intention behind implementing a virtual office infrastructure is that employees can work from any geography. The base application platforms that address end-to-end business processes are already in place. The organisation is now constantly building new features and applications on this framework. in terms of management, innovation and support, Sebastian has done things differently. The core team that supports the business application is a five member team. The entire project management – Design, implementation, support and infrastructure management is done by the core team. The development and testing are carried out through a cost effective staffing model. 23 outsourced consultants operate out of company premises, managed by the five member team, thus ensuring effective project management.

Sebastian Joseph, President technology & FM, Mudra Group Ltd implemented an Mudra Branch Operations support system for 20 percent of the cost of SAP.