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.