MindTree Reworks Business Plan With IBM Cognos

Imagine a scenario where the CFO and other concerned stakeholders are assembled in the meeting room of an organisation. Everything is set to roll but the Excel sheet prepared for capturing the discussion points, budget allocations etc takes several minutes to load. C-level executives have spared their precious time but the system is playing spoilsport and the business agenda thus, does not roll forward smoothly. A situation like this can be quite putting off. The above scenario occurred more than once in the meeting rooms of MindTree, a global IT solutions company, specialising in IT services, independent testing, infrastructure management and technical support. Finally, the CFO of MindTree one day shot an e-mail to the company’s CIO saying thus, “We can’t do this on the Excel sheet anymore. We need another tool that would simplify our annual planning process.”

Moreover, for a company like MindTree that has operations in 17 countries and has made seven acquisitions in the recent past, the time was ripe to move over to a more reliable business-planning platform. Thus, after thorough deliberations the company went in for IBM Cognos. Let us trace MindTree’s journey through this adoption.

More from Biztech

Future Group - Reliance Retail Deal approved by CCI RBI ban on cryptocurrencies takes effect; prohibition could force investors to tap the black market

Underlying Pressures

MindTree was using an Excel-based planning tool. The data size was becoming almost 90 megabytes and the file took several minutes to open.

The most important aspects driving the switch from MS Excel to IBM Cognos were complexity and scale of the planning process. “Historically, we were into IT Services and R&D Services. When we acquired Aztechsoft, it was into the Product Engineering Services business,” says Sudhir K Reddy, CIO-MindTree. So, considering the growth in business verticals, the company’s planning process became extremely complex and scaled immensely.

“We figured out many errors happening in the Excel sheet. The entire process was also consuming a lot of time. Also, after the completion of the data capture process, the CEO would often like to examine various ‘what-if’ scenarios. For example, what if the dollar rate this year gradually declines from Rs 50 to Rs 42? None of this was possible with the Excel-based tool,” says Reddy.

One other issue was input collation. “We used to involve 40-60 stakeholders in the planning process and would send out an equal number of Excel templates to all of them that were meant to be filled and sent back,” says Reddy. “After the templates came back, somebody had to pull all that data together, which proved to be a challenge. And if the templates were modified, they had to be sent out all over again. This was turning out to be cumbersome.”

The Hunt Begins

Three products were evaluated. The criteria were not based purely on a Gartner quadrant or ranking. “We also considered the nature of our partnerships and the kind of solutions our partners use,” says Reddy. Microsoft and SAP were in the race to start with. “We looked at SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft Performance Point. IBM came into the picture later,” informs Reddy.

In the final stage, Cognos and BusinessObjects came very close. Performance Point was just beginning its journey in the business analytics space. “We were looking for a single tool that would help us with planning, consolidation and reporting,” says Reddy.

As far as consolidation was concerned, IBM Cognos proved to be second best after Hyperion. MindTree already had a Sequel-based reporting server from Microsoft; however, they were looking at a common report painter. When compared to Business Objects with its crystal clear reports, Cognos came very close except that the Overlap Engines capability in Cognos was a little better.

Lastly planning wise, Reddy feels that Cognos was a lot more user friendly. It allowed easy playing around with the templates. The stakeholders of MindTree often travel around the globe. Thus to make things easy for them, a Server Time Protocol (STP) link could be delivered and they would get most of the Excel-type functionality on the template published on the Web. It offered the best of both. People, who were used to Excel, would not feel uncomfortable using Cognos. “We could automate a lot of stuff in the form of templates without too much coding,” says Reddy.

Another little known fact is that BusinessObjects, while it was a great product, was one code revision behind, while IBM had already invested in upgrading its tool to the latest level of code at the time when MindTree was scanning the market. The SAP acquisition of BusinessObjects was on and the former had yet to integrate the latter into the SAP matrix. Therefore, if MindTree had chosen BusinessObjects, the consequence would have been about three years of pain while the product was refreshed and integrated into the SAP matrix. “Consequently, we would have to go through an upgrade process after the refresh became live,” says Reddy.

A Smooth Planning Process

Talking about the benefits of the deployment, Reddy says, “IBM Cognos is centralised and database-enabled. Changes are dispersed across the board and managed from one place, which avoids duplication. It allows proper maintenance of reference data and marking the data as required. For example, dollar data by country, average IT cost per individual, average travel cost by route, all this data is maintained separately. All that the users have to do is punch a trip to the US and the dollar amount appears because already there is a route master data set in the system.”

Going further, the solution offers the ability to enable templates on the Web with Excel power. It is also HTML-enabled. Anybody can put in their numbers globally. There is no need to circulate huge user manuals for these.

The solution also has the ability to monitor progress centrally. If the industry sub-heads have been given one week to submit their numbers, then the solution provides real-time information on those who have already submitted the same, how many are working on it, how many are partially done etc.

The central availability of the data is a huge plus. Hitherto, the data was scattered in e-mails. However, now it is available in one central location on a Web-based platform. It is integrated with the back-end system of SAP. This also helps in involving a large stakeholder base for making business decisions. More than 100 people contribute to the plan. Earlier, a conscious decision to scale down the stakeholders had to be taken, in order to avoid complications.

“Our RoI was 128 percent within the first year of implementation,” says Reddy. IBM Cognos was implemented in the financial year 2009-10. The approximate cost of deployment was Rs 14-15 lakh for the company.