CIOIN

Sebastian Joseph, EVP and Head Technology

Mudra Communications

“Depending on the urgency of a job a studio manager can now split and assign it to multiple operators.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner:Sebastian Joseph introduced the project- mTRACT, which would help carve out a separate SBU for 'studio outsourced operations' and make their services available to any client globally. The project would thus bring transparency and define processes, resulting in increased accountability.

Mudra Communications is the third-largest advertising agency in India. One of the consequences of being that big was that each of its advertising unit (across multiple locations) had its own studio, which led to under-utilization of resources. Mudra wanted to carve out the geographically-dispersed studios into a separate SBU and help Mudra be more efficient and scale up operations more easily. The integration would also enable it to seamlessly assign jobs across locations depending on workload and specialization.

In tune with this business objective, Sebastian Joseph, EVP and head technology, Mudra Communications, decided to embark on Project mTRACT. The project would help carve out a separate SBU for 'studio outsourced operations' and make their services available to any client globally. It would also create a central repository of all existing artworks. The project would introduce transparency and define processes, resulting in increased accountability.

However, several challenges threatened to derail the project, including people. "There was apprehension and resistance from users," says Joseph. To overcome this, Joseph roped in change agents right at the start and kept users informed at every stage. He also conducted regular training sessions to individuals and groups.

Once Joseph addressed these challenges, the project went live in February 2009. The completely Open Source solution brought many benefits to Mudra. It led to efficient job allocation and re-assigning of jobs based on workloads. Now each stakeholder can ascertain the status of a job through a dashboard and studio managers can see job queue, operator-wise workloads, etcetera.

The move also helped the company realize significant cost savings. Earlier, images and artwork were stored in source formats like PSD and AI files. Just to view them users required Adobe software licenses. mTRACT has a built-in function that automatically converts source files into thumbnails on the fly and displays them as JPEGs. This has saved Mudra about Rs 15 lakh in licenses.

Also, prior to the implementation, each client servicing resource spent four hours everyday physically explaining a job to a studio operator to get artwork executed. With the mTRACT system, instructions can be relayed online thus saving travel time. This has resulted in savings of around Rs 40 lakh per annum.