02.11.2009

Scale to Survive

By: Perry Manross

Opportunities in full relief

Like its native home town of Noida, Prognosys has experienced explosive growth in the past few years. Business boomed by 300 % in 2007 and 2008. And like Noida, Prognosys needs to stay on top of its own rapid development. “Unfortunately, we were so preoccupied with the business we were getting that we lost sight of the business we weren’t getting,” Ranjan says. As a smaller, private market intelligence provider, Prognosys relies on the depth of its relationships with a select number of large clients. Often multinationals, these clients have several, if not dozens, of departments, whose decisions to invest in market intelligence are made independently of one another. “It is critical to the success of our organization that we know the distribution of the business we are receiving from these divisions and identify those divisions in whose market research activities we could be more closely involved,” Ranjan says.

As Ranjan explains, Prognosys needed a system that could track and analyze the profitability of each project, product mix, client engagement, and division engagement. “The end ideal is a focus on delivering our most profitable services and products to clients with whom our relationships are most profitable,” Ranjan says.

Ranjan cites a client Prognosys has worked with since 2004, one of the largest printer manufacturers in the world. It was not until the implementation of the SAP Business ByDesign solution in 2009 that Prognosys was able to systematically analyze white space among this client’s divisions. In the last three months, the amount of revenue that Prognosys has booked from the additional divisions is equal to what it received from the initial division over the past four years. In addition to providing more clarity into ist business, SAP Business ByDesign helps Prognosys keep better tabs on productivity. Project managers can track the duration of tasks and take corrective action if the duration deviates from expectations. This capability has reduced the number of delayed projects from one in five to isolated incidents.

Also, the integrated invoice tracking capabilities of SAP Business ByDesign have helped Prognosys reduce collection days from 24 to 7, improving the company’s cash flow. “This essentially gives us 15 days of working capital, which is a big, big surplus for an SME organization relying on sales to fund its operations,” Ranjan says.

Although these IT enhancements have been a boon compared to the disparate systems and spreadsheets Prognosys had relied on, Ranjan notes that SAP Business ByDesign does not yet provide the employee management and pettycash management capabilities his company needs. He is hoping for a greater scope of capabilities in feature pack 2.0. On the whole, Ranjan explains, the staff at Prognosys has embraced SAP Business ByDesign: “Our sales and marketing people are happy because they don’t have to maintain so many sales-call reports in spreadsheets that don’t ‘talk to each other.’ Our finance guys are happy because all purchasing activity can be controlled and tracked in one system. And I am very happy because I can get the information I need on my own at any time.”

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