Advertising Analytics for Actionable Insights at Ramco

Cements Limited
Deo Ashish Samanta (19BM6JP44), PGDBA-2021

July 1st, 2019 (Monday)

This is a report on a case study, developed by Prof. Indranil Bose and Debprotim Dutta
at IIM Calcutta Case Research Centre, on Ramco Cements Limited (RCL). The core prob-
lem in this case lied in the marketing strategies of RCL, which was resolved by implementing
the business intelligence and the efforts made by IT team of the company. The pivotal idea in
the solution was to superimpose the key performance indicators (KPIs) and “advertisement
data” on a map of the region of interest.

Started in 1957, the brick-and-mortar company, RCL had an inclination towards latest tech-
nologies and IT for solving the business problems. RCL had an enterprise resource planning
(ERP) for accumulating real-time operational data and transactional data. Analyzing these
data made the company efficient at production and at the customer’s end. This conveyed
that the RCL was a data driven company which was setting a trend in terms innovation.
Further, the company improved it’s business intelligence after the initiatives taken by A.
V. Dharmakrishnan, RCL’s CEO, in 2011. Dharmakrishnan stressed on building a system
which could accumulate the data associated with performance and also could depict it’s
“visualization”. Moreover, this system was meant to provide data access from any digital
device accustomed with an operating system. In result, the IT wing came up with the three
applications, the Ramco Geaoapps, which used Google map for depicting data associated
with geography of the performance; Ramco Perfmon, which plotted the KPIs visually; and
Ramco Advanced Planning and Optimization, which optimized the outbound logistic costs.
According to Dharmakrishnan, this helped RCL in capturing 20-30% market share in un-
represented markets and also in reducing penalties, losses and demurrage. There were some
shortcomings initially for the Ramco Perfmon, as it lacked in having a standard scheme for
evaluation of performances of both company and employees, one of the reason for this was
vaguely defined KPIs. Also, there was no consistent method of comparing the performances
spread over the geographical regions. RCL was successful to solve these issues by standard-
izing KPIs and introducing a dashboard, which can now give the comparison and assessment
integrated with geographical information.

The advertising of RCL was the key problem as it was lacking in the logical strategies.
Due to convention, the advertisements were conveyed using billboards and posters at tangi-
ble platforms. Among these platforms, finding a strategic location for putting billboards and

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hoardings was the major task. The problem here was that, there was no efficient tracking
system for the strategic positions, their expiry dates, contract status for the delivered jobs
and the standards of the advertisements. These issues arose because the company relied on
the wisdom of contractors and local sales personnel for deciding the locations for putting up
the advertisements, as a result it was also cumbersome to manage and verify the database
collected for the delivered jobs since the only proof for the job was a photo album. The com-
pany didn’t have the positions of their competitive advertisements, resulted in poor market
strategies. The selection of the location was pivotal as it was causing a cluttering of ad-
vertisements in some areas but leaving many selling deficient areas. It is important to note
that these practices in the company resulted in delayed, tedious and cumbersome payment
process which may/could have caused disappointments in the contract. The precise business
problem was that the marketing division was not managing a robust data-driven system,
which was affecting the sales of the company. RCL had already implemented business intel-
ligence in solving their human resource problems, now it was the marketing area where they
had to come up with the smart and clever solutions.

The IT team of RCL came up with a holistic system which primarily used Google map
to locate the coordinates of all the advertisements of both RCL and it’s competitors. This
system was also customized for recording data related to expiry dates, contractor details,
date of contract, size of hoardings et cetera. This made the data visually more interpretable.
In order to get most out of this system, it was important to update the data continuously.
So, RCL made the uploading of photographs, coordinates and other details as part of the
contract and linked it to the payment process. So this not only resourced the data but,
also gave a structure in the payment process, making it more efficient. The development of
this system was a good investment as the holistic view on all the regions of business was
extremely difficult without this solution. The next job was to analyze these data for action-
able insights. Now the company could also integrate the previous dashboard containing the
KPI’s with the new system, this would give how KPI’s are region sensitive. Drilling down
to the details now the company could explain and solve the micro level problems specific to
the regions. They could also decide the size and the number of advertisements that is to
be put in accordance with the population, residential area, highway locations et cetera for
better visibility of their advertisements. Now RCL could optimize its returns on investment
in marketing and also in other divisions, which finally made the company a data analytics
firm.

RCL did face certain challenges during the implementation. Many contractors were con-
servative,hence reluctant, towards uploading data, buying expensive camera which captures
coordinates and other new norms of the company. They were also not well oriented with
the technologies involved in the process. The IT team developed an android system based
camera application, which could now capture the pictures along with the coordinates and
other details. They also initiated a training program for orienting the contractors for usage
of this application. It almost took 3 months for the new system for adoption and functioning.
Though this system seems to be robust but, in future they might need to improve it.