| An
Interview : CEO of Apollo Industries
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| Apollo
Industries, a market leader in Road Construction
Equipment with global sales operation and
centralized production facility. Apollo is BSE
listed firm with strong revenues, growth, well
established product portfolio and talented team.
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For the last decade, a lot of
emphasis has been given to infrastructure in
India and while this represents a potentially
higher market opportunity it has also led to
increased competition and for an innovative
market leader such as Apollo, increased
challenges to maintain its leadership position.
This led to the company looking at its critical
business processes and has prioritized the
processes that needed to be strengthened using
technology, evaluated different technology
platform and finally put in place a strong
framework to help the organization
scale.
Mr. Dharmesh Mashru, CEO,
Apollo Industries has played various
roles including senior leadership positions in
close to 30 years of experience in various
Indian and Multi-National organizations
primarily related to the machinery manufacturing
industry.
His immense experience in the
machinery manufacturing industry helps in his
role at Apollo Industries of business
strategies, product strategies, operations
management, strategic alliances and team
building.
In this interview, Mr. Mashru,
who has been at forefront of this transition at
Apollo, shares his insights on pressures of
being a market leader, competition, the current
market condition internationally and its impact
on India, their key strategies to manage growth
and how they leverage cloud technology to manage
their business processes to enable this
growth. |
| KVP: Over the last decade,
focus on infrastructure in India has been very
high, how has it impacted
Apollo? |
Dharmesh Mashru :
At, Apollo, we have had a long heritage of
building great products, strong customer focus,
good and loyal employees and fantastic service
culture. As a leader with a large market share,
we are always under pressure to perform and meet
market expectations.
Today the global
heavy duty equipment market is undergoing a
consolidation. The market is also shrinking due
to stagnation in the developed nations across
North America and Europe, political and economic
instability in Africa and Middle East is also
stressing the current players to look at Asia.
India and China, on the other hand are investing
and driving the growth in infrastructure and
while this presents a great opportunity, there
is also an increased competition as all players
are eyeing this market. Any new entrant in
Indian market will need to come up with various
innovative and attractive customer approach
strategies to break into the market where a very
strong player like Apollo is present. This
throws a challenge to Apollo to maintain
customer contact and keep educating customers
against any such eye-catching
strategies.
Apart from competition, while
there is a strong thrust on road infrastructure
development in India, there a gap between
planning and ground reality. The rate of plan
implementation is slow, add to it the usual
bureaucratic hurdles means that there is a lack
of momentum in actual implementation as compared
to what is being projected. Hence, the
competition is being attracted by the projected
figures without actual demand having reached
close to it. |
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| KVP: What are your priorities as
a business to address this challenge?
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Dharmesh Mashru: For
us to maintain the pace of growth, taking our
competition head-on and striving for market
share is core to our business in the current
situation. For this, the priorities would be as
follows:
- Increase customer intimacy: Close
contact customers educating them about our
product features and providing them with factual
information to help them judge between real and
eyewash strategies being adopted by new
competitors on board
- Strengthen account relationship to ensure
higher customer satisfaction
- Increased focus / research on new product
development and product upgrades to maintain
market leader position
- Improve efficiency using effective
communication between sales and backend
production to reduce cycle time and improve
operational efficiencies and eliminate
communication gaps and provide effective
analytical tools for better decision making.
- Analyze competitive landscape and refine
go-to-market plan to retain and grow market
share
- Control on cost at all levels for
cost-effective product manufacturing
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| KVP: What were the key
business processes you wanted to address as a
part of your growth
strategies? |
Dharmesh Mashru: A
key part of our business success lies in the
ability to identify the market opportunity in
order to qualify it correctly and gain an early
mover advantage. As market leader and
established brand, we do get to be part of most
of the opportunities due to strong brand pull
but in order to maintain that position
especially in a market that is slowly becoming
difficult for reasons mentioned previously, we
should be more proactive in our approach to the
market. Hence, structuring our market
intelligence and provide a structured
information collection, analyzing and sharing
tool is the priority.
The next is to
improve our business cycles by using effective
quoting mechanism and improve approval
mechanisms in a manner that is systematic,
standardized, quick and transparent. This
ensures that we reduce the internal delays
within the organization and provide more connect
with the customer.
Third, was to
streamline front-line sales and back-end
operations to ensure effective communication in
order to avoid any gaps and reduce
inefficiencies that not only impacts our margins
but also has a significant impact on customer
satisfaction.
And last but not the least
streamline after sales support function and
provide a tool that can monitor our large
equipment base, large team of customer care
across the country and provide exceptional
alerts and reports to the line managers for them
to be proactive and improve customer
satisfaction levels. Structuring the domain
knowledge and providing a secure tool to
disseminate was also critical given the width
and depth of our product lines, technical
diversity, large team and anticipated increase
in attrition rate due to anticipated increase in
competition. | |
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| KVP: What were the steps
you took to go about in identifying setting up
right foundation to manage growth
strategies? |
Dharmesh Mashru: The
real value of any strategy is only when it is
put into action and implemented. We ensure all
actions are well governed by a strong yet simple
process. An important aspect is to make sure
that every process is a part of the work life
and should enable individuals to be more
productive. In order for the team to be
productive and effective a technology back bone
is critical which can automate those processes.
The technology that we use for automation should
be simple to use yet be effective and scalable.
This is critical as if the users do not adopt
the system, then the entire decision making
function cannot operate efficiently.
Also, businesses adapt and scale over a
period of time and it is important that the
technology is flexible and scalable to
incorporate the requirements of not just today
but also those of the future without having to
reinvent the wheel all over again. Investments
in technology would mean that the returns happen
over an extended timeframe and hence the
technology needs to be relevant for a fairly
long period of time to justify the
investment.
Keeping these in mind and to
ensure we defined the right foundation we chose
a process driven cloud technology solution which
is cost-effective, flexible and
scalable. |
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| KVP: You have good
adoption rate on technology, what actions you
took to ensure user
adoption? |
Dharmesh Mashru:
Team acceptance and buy-in is critical for any
system to effectively perform. We defined a core
user group and involved them upfront during
process planning. This involvement helped us
gain the trust and confidence from users group
upfront and also gave them a sense of ownership.
The Core group defined the need from the
system and what the objectives of system are.
This helped us bind the core group to the
project and also helped bring the perspective of
the users into the entire system. We made sure
that we kept users in the centre while defining
the system and always questioned as to how the
users will be benefited from the system.
We also documented the reports and
dashboards we need from the system upfront so
that there is clarity of system structuring with
the outputs in the mind.
The system
covered a larger scope with strong positive
compulsions to ensure there is enough motivation
for the users to make it a part of their work
life. For example: We are building quotes and
quote approval from the system, we ensure sales
orders for production are driven out of the
system. This apart, dispatch and invoicing are
done from the system and finally we go the
entire customer support organization to be
covered as part of the platform to ensure we
optimize utilization and also bring right focus
on system.
Training and hands-on
orientation was provided not just for users but
also for management on what and how they could
extract data for effective analytics. In fact,
the hand holding was extended over a period of
time with continuous support and monitoring
being done to make sure that users were provided
adequate support during the period of
transition. |
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In summary:
- Management involvement and reviews through
the system is the most important function of
adoption
- Giving an orientation of the system to be a
tool to improve the operational manager’s own
efficiency and performance instead of the system
being viewed as monitoring and data collection
tool being imposed by the management is
extremely important to gain ownership and imbibe
self propelling force in using the system.
- Defining process upfront and involving user
group during the development stage helped
improve commitment as well as to incorporate all
the ground zero conditions and practicalities
before hand.
- Evaluate and select the tool based on an
analysis of the feature sets required for
executing the process efficiently
- Use the system much beyond data repository
and reporting system by introducing and covering
processes which will improve productivity and
collaboration across the board. The information
must flow seamlessly from one process to the
next without needing duplicate data entry to
avoid the potential error points and also to
reduce the boredom.
- The initiative should be spearheaded by a
management representative and driven as a
corporate initiative rather than a tool
implementation
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