Asian Paints was founded in 1942 we are
headquartered in India, in Mumbai. We have
a turnover of around 2.5 billion USD. Outside of India we are present
in 12 other countries largely in the
emerging markets of Middle East,
Southeast Asia and more recently in
Africa. Through these countries we serve
customers in over 60 countries. Asian
Paints rearchitected its vision to
state that we want to really you know
empower customers to create their dream
homes. The idea from the IT perspective
was to put in an architecture which
would scale at the same time it will
allow to bolt on next generation digital
experiences on top of the stable core.
This initiative seeded primarily because
of the business ambition to scale our
partner loyalty program as well as
unifying the partner loyalty program
across all our various business units. As
part of this digital transformation we
were really looking at a partner who would
work with our strong in-house IT team to
help us realize this journey in an
accelerated fashion. We found in
Cognizant a partner who would bring us
global best practices, the passion to you
know help us deliver on these
next-generation capabilities and the
team on ground had the
understanding not only of business
processes and the technology, were taking
a fairly in end-to-end point of view of
the problem statement and
deliver the entire solution end-to-end.
The loyalty program is a good means for
this partner ecosystem to benchmark
their own performances to establish
credibility in the market place and
finally it's our way of
acknowledging their contribution
towards delivering those pleasurable and
magic moments for our customers. We
decided to align with SAP because of
its strong partner ecosystem, Cognizant
being one of them. When we looked at an
implementation partner,
we really wanted somebody who came with
a lot of domain expertise. I wanted the
agility of a start-up and along with the
fact that it comes with the great
governance. These two factors played in
favor of Cognizant; it was first of its
kind.
SAP Hybris billing was not
used per se for the type of scenarios
we were modeling anywhere across the globe. The Cognizant and the Asian Paints teams
got together and put up a very solid
blueprint which would scale for the
future. To classify the benefits of this
program at three levels... at a
strategic level, the tactical and
operational level and the strategic
level obviously it brings his more
stickiness in the business; it binds the
entire ecosystem towards delivering
those wow moments. At a tactical level,
business seems to have more control on
the entire program, their ability to
conceptualize newer programs and quickly
market them is becoming a big
advantage. The fact that we are able to
roll this model to other loyalty
programs across the globe is a huge
advantage.
They must appreciate the fact that
Cognizant has done a great job in terms
of ensuring the architecture is modular
and decoupled enough for us to extend
the entire benefits to various customer
types and different geographies. We've
been able to achieve business
efficiencies largely due to the solution
architecture that we have deployed on SAP Hybris billing platform. From a
platform efficiency point of view, we
have been able to scale India program
and extend it to our international units
with minimum customizations. From a
business efficiency point of view, we
have been able to roll out newer
programs as well as enable a newer
channel for instant gratification for
our partners. Cognizant consultants were
really passionate about solving the
business problem out there ensuring that
the architecture is scaleable,
it is also fungible because as a
business was evolving we really had to
constantly keep on adapting the newer
processes, the newer loyalty programs on
top of the the engine. Essentially the
objective with which we started on these
three initiatives have all got achieved
by the strong partnership with Cognizant.
