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.

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 is 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.

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 backbone 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.

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. Keeping these in mind, we chose a process-driven cloud technology solution which is cost-effective, flexible, and scalable.

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:

Dharmesh Mashru: For the project, we first picked people from the user group who were representative of the different functions which will be impacted by the system. This core group defined the need from the system and what the objectives of system are. This helped us bind the core group and provide structured information.

We also brought the perspective of the users into the entire system which helped us gain the trust and confidence from users group upfront and gave them a sense of ownership. 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 documented the reports and dashboards we need from the system upfront so that there is clarity of system structuring with the outputs in 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.

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. The hand holding was extended over a period of time with continuous support and monitoring to make sure users were provided adequate support during the period of transition.