Advertising Made Easy with Media Management Portal

FMCG major Marico boasts of a wide array of products in the hair care, skin care and wellness space. To fight for mind space in such a highly competitive and fragmented market, the company, like all other companies in the sector, resorts to advertising.

Highlights

-- The core objective was to enable financial and accounting control on spends management and payments to media agencies.

-- Moving away from Excel sheets has reduced overdue to zero -- from about 5-10 percent.

"We spend around Rs 160 crore [US$34,154] including media (Rs 92 crore) and non-media (Rs 68 crore) on advertising. That's why analyzing advertising and sales promotion (ASP) expenses is extremely essential for us, "says Girish Rao, head-IT, Marico.

But, the level of efficiency in managing such huge volumes of transactions between the company's media management team and media agencies left much to be desired. The system also lacked transparency and visibility because of which analyzing the ASP spend became an issue.

This hamstrung efficient decision-making. "There was a need to reduce the cycle time of each transaction and increase the transparency of processes," says Rao. A B2B media management portal - which would act as the middle-man between Marico's media management team and media agencies - was the answer. The core objective was to enable financial and accounting control on spends management and payments to media agencies. It wasn't smooth sailing, though. "In order to ensure smooth data transfer between the systems and on-line controls like budget checks and data validations, integration with the existing ERP was a must. Unless both the teams used the portal adequately, the required information would not be present on it," says Rao.

A series of debates and discussions between the IT team and the users brought them on the same page.

Once these impediments were overcome, the project went live in June 2008. "Before we had the portal, processing media bills took about 15 days. Now it takes less than five days. The system reduced the chances of duplication during bill processing. Earlier, the final closure of the estimates of media vendors was carried out on phone - a process that used to take a week. Now it takes about two-three days," says Rao. Moving away from Excel sheets has reduced overdue to zero - from about 5-10 percent. Subsequently, the credit rating of the company in this area has improved.