RCL (Ramco Cement Limited) was a subsidiary of Ramco Group which mainly operated in southern India and primarily

sold Portland cement. It supplied cement to both trade and institutional customers, but major proportion of the
supplies was sent to “trade” customers through a massive dealer network managed by a sales team on which RCL
was heavily reliant. RCL had an ERP system through which it had collected massive amount of data primarily of 2 types
– 1. Real time operational Data: Consisted of key metrics which were used to gauge the health of various stages in
the manufacturing process. 2. Transactional Data: Consisted of business transactions such as invoices, customer etc.

RCL felt that the ERP system was not able to properly utilize the data/draw insights from it, and thus they wanted
their IT department to develop the following : 1. A cross platform system to measure the effective revamped KPIs at
state, zonal, regional, area, district and employee level and depicted in an intuitive manner using visualizations 2. A
complex optimization tool which would be used to optimize the outbound logistics cost. The IT team developed
Ramco Geoapps, Ramco Perfmon and Ramco Advanced Planning and Optimization to resolve these issues. These
applications reduced losses and penalties in the process by 70% and improved consignment clearance time by up to
40%. Due to geographical representation of data, they managed to capture 20-30% market share in unrepresented
markets. The applications were also used to improve the employee performance monitoring & appraisal method for
employees using dashboards.

Due to such unprecedented success, RCL decided to implement such innovative changes in the marketing division.
RCL had been historically reliant on a wide network of advertising contractors and sales officers to advertise its
product using roadside billboards, hoardings, posters etc. This was a very inefficient process since there was no proper
oversight and factors such as optimized location of billboards, its concentration, and dimensions etc. Such issues were
majorly happening due to lack of proper advertising data records or analytics system. To remedy this, the IT team
came up with an “advertising map” system which all the RCL and competitor’s advertising assets were mapped on a
google map. Information regarding all the billboards, wall paintings etc including photographs, latitude, longitude was
to be fed into the system by advertising contractors and verified later by sales officers. The system faced a lot of
challenges including unenthusiasm and scepticism of contractors and sales officers, lack of technical knowledge, initial
investment in costly cameras etc but these were dealt with through a combination of technology (development of
android camera app) and proper training. This data was used to devise effective advertising strategies. This time, the
factors such as billboard locations, dimensions, density etc were factored in while processing payments for the
contractors. Thus, inclusion of Information Technology and Business Intelligence helped RCL completely overhaul
some of its business functions. There are a number of lessons which can be learnt from Ramco’s endeavour – one of
them being that it is very crucial to properly define the business statement, it was due to the fact that management
had clear goals in mind that the IT team was able to come up with efficient solutions for business functions. Another
lesson is that cooperation with the stakeholders is especially important during the implementation of technology-
oriented business solutions as evident in the dealing of RCL management with contractors. But there is a significant
caveat, except from the optimization of outbound logistics cost, I don’t think they have yet applied any sophisticated
machine learning algorithms like decision trees, neural networks etc .on their data and these techniques can be really
helpful with large datasets like that of RCL to further improve business functions.