ABOUT THE CUSTOMERThe customer is a leading U.S.-based Marketing Services company. Its 1,500 dedicated marketing consultants work with about 435,000 local businesses to create customized marketing programs to help reach their customers. The company’s products include online and mobile-based search solutions, print yellow pages directories and voice-based search platforms.

The future strategic vision of the company is: Capitalizing on the digital opportunity and capturing a greater share of the growing digital market.

HCL enables

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONthrough PARTNERSHIP and

for a Leading U.S basedCOLLABORATION

Marketing Services Company

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The continuing decline in the use of print directories, increased competition—particularly from existing and emerging online companies— and decreased ad sales due to ongoing weak economic conditions made “digitization” not a mandate, but an essentiality for the company’s survival.

The company was looking for a strategic IT partner who could optimize their spend on operations, as well as revitalize and add to their digital product portfolio.

ENGAGEMENT MANDATESThe overall objective of the company was to drive “Digitization - both internally and externally” to create a significant cost advantage, backed by IT optimization. They aimed to do this by:

• Expanding services and establishing a full complement of digital products. Rapidly expanding digital offerings to increase penetration rates among consumers and expanding share of wallet from advertisers.

• Internal change and reorganization via a massive skills refresh. Seven hundred professionals were hired with marketing, sales and digital development as key skill areas.

The engagement leveraged best practices from HCL’s prior successful projects and was further cemented on the basis of HCL’s understanding of the fundamental transformation sweeping the advertising industry as a whole. HCL in collaboration with the customer effectively gauged business requirements — by interacting at all levels and with key functions across the customer organization performed a detailed as-is-analysis and built a suitable business case for implementing digital initiatives and developing and supporting applications.

HCL’s supported several business functions including advertiser self-service, marketing, sales, production and CRM.

ENGAGEMENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Application development, support and upgrade: HCL supports 50+ Enterprise Applications like Business Data Warehouse, reporting, custom web applications, marketing and sales functions, back office production, Oracle HR/ Finance modules, Documentum, print and digital delivery platforms, self-service portals and databases.

• Platform development, sustenance and support: Several new revenue generation platforms on mobile, web and social channel, advertiser value creation platforms, advertising network, digital search engine and cloud-based applications for sales force automation platform. Additionally, HCL helped customer define a digital, multi-channel strategy for web, ad networks, social media and mobile.

• Helpdesk services and support: Helpdesk management with 24/7/365 L1/L2 staffing, providing remote support across all customer locations and on-site support at eight key customer offices.

• Implementing quality assurance for the enterprise suite of applications: Such as graphics and marketing systems, print and digital applications, mobile applications, digital delivery platforms and back-end search engines. HCL executed agile-based testing cycles and performed automation, functional, regression and performance testing.

• Co-creating value, enhancing productivity for customer organization: By implementing value portals and metrics program to gauge quality of deliverables and team productivity.

• Digital innovation: Leveraging its Digital Media Lab, HCL and customer jointly analyzed industry trends, developed and/or showcased relevant solution accelerators around search engine optimization, online directories, social enterprise and mobile applications. Some key solutions proposed to the customer organization from HCL include Mobile Augmented Reality, mobile coupons, N=1 Personalization, Socialytics, contextual browser, self-service advertising platform, optimizing social media strategies for Facebook/ customer website, TV/ social media widgets and Blinke (eCommerce framework).

• Fostering multi-channel capabilities: For enabling digital transformation on the mobile, social and TV platforms, adjacent to the print business to enable improved monetization and broader audience reach.

• Other initiatives where HCL is collaborating with the customer organization are:

- Back Office optimization through digital ERP, leveraging existing investments and meeting their objective to create a strong, scalable backend with a deep data/ analytics capability

- Integration of/ migration to SFDC for their 1,500+ marketing and sales team.

HCL DIFFERENCE The engagement leveraged the following HCL capabilities, practices, CoEs, frameworks and competencies for success:

• HCL’s Media and Entertainment practice: Deep-domain competencies, frameworks and people maturity

- Over 13 years of experience, with 6,000+ people and deep-domain competencies, helping customers leverage latest industry insights and trends

- Strong co-creation model with key customers and vertical partners

- Innovation in outsourcing through customizable business models, delivery approaches, service standards, processes and methodologies for effective cost optimization

- Product development expertise across mobility, consumer electronics, telecom, broadcasting and digital marketing

- Technology centers of excellence, which include Enterprise Applications, DW/ BI, CRM/ Salesforce.com, internet/ web technologies and mobility

- Key partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, EMC, Tibco and a host of micro-vertical focused partnerships

• Digital Media & Publishing Lab – A key investment and technology commitment:

With an investment of $5 mn and innovation at its heart, the HCL Media Lab aims to provide technology leadership to the media and entertainment industry. The Digital Media & Publishing Lab has 20+ relevant solution frameworks in the areas of Content Life Cycle Management, Content on Demand, Digital Rights Management, Digital Asset Management, Cross Media Advertisement Management, Artist Management, Social Media, Video Content Analytics, Interoperable Testing and iTV applications. Many of these solutions were used at customer organization to accelerate the development process and speed-to-market.

• Tool and technology leadership for business advantage:

- Value Creation Portal, an HCL tool for promoting ideation and identifying potential areas of innovation

- Innovation Dashboard, an analytics and dashboard framework that allows leaders to assess the health of the project and potential areas of implementation

- ProcessWatch, HCL’s framework to visualize the business process down to application and infrastructure, outline constraints, bottlenecks and redundancies for improvement

- BusinessWare, a systematic business case development framework to determine the cost-benefit analysis of new digital/ IT initiatives and draw several “what-if” analysis

- Process Compliance: A comprehensive process compliance framework (PCI) for ensuring quality assurance across all service lines

• HCL’s state-of-the-art transition framework (ASSeT):

- Overall tracking and monitoring of the transition through ASSeT transition monitoring tools

- Structured ASSeT processes and templates for accelerating documentation, reviews and understanding the customer applications and processes

- Qualified transition managers to manage schedules, deliverables, risk, cost and resources

- Seamless transition without any business disruption

BUSINESS BENEFITS• Cost optimization: HCL’s offshore-driven delivery mechanism, reduction of

overall team size and productivity improvements helped realize cost savings of over 20% by optimizing and consolidating print IT operations in North Carolina and India towards a goal of recording $140 mn in cost savings in 2011.

• Digital growth of 30%: Attributed to innovation in mobile, online and digital media with a new and innovative proposition around reputation management.

• Ensuring minimum disruption to business through a seamless and quick transition plan and systematic implementation of processes. This centered on cost improvement, 10% SLA improvement, cycle-time reduction, process improvement, component reuse, tool development and overall delivery efficiencies of 20%.

• Boosting business agility and leading to a faster turnaround time by using the agile development methodology and providing operational reliability and flexibility through quick ramp-up of onsite and offshore teams, in a desired timeframe, with the right-skilled resources.

• Contributing to delivery excellence by establishing and implementing a well-defined governance methodology and performance metrics.

• Reduced internal headcount by 30% (back-office).

KEY SUCCESS FACTORS • HCL demonstrated a superior understanding of challenges and issues and

leveraged its experience, process and frameworks to gain the confidence of key customer representatives.

• Constant communication established between customer organization and HCL at all times and stages in this relationship.

• HCL and the customer developed the solution jointly with each of the respective track leads and then presented it to the CTO for sign-off. HCL enabled a “seamless and zero business disruption” oriented transition plan.

• A set of 27 core delivery and performance metrics have been defined for the engagement, which helped measure and ensure quality, process compliance and schedule management.

• HCL set up a multi-governance model for the customer organization; a structured communications and reporting approach with project level governance, operational review and regular steering committee meetings.

CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS “We needed a dramatic transformation led by a strong digitization drive, we needed to quickly revitalize our print based products and transform them into improved, easy to consume digital suite of products. We also needed to drive several other objectives such as cost reduction, improved flexibility, agility, and process excellence. With HCL as our partner of choice we were confident we would be able to outperform on all fronts” said Atish Banerjea, SVP and CTO, Customer Organization.

“By selecting HCL Technologies, we gained solid engineering expertise that complemented our Santa Monica, California and Denver digital product development teams. This powerful combination of people and processes has reduced development cycle times and accelerated the delivery of new digital solutions to our customers. Beyond the operational benefits, this partnership reduced our costs and is part of the company’s larger effort to record $140 mn in cost savings in 2011,” said Atish Banerjea, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Customer Organization.

“We brought in HCL in July 2011, and have already seen significant results. We have reduced internal headcount by 30% and reduced IT operating costs by over 20%. Additionally, HCL is playing a critical role in several of our new product development initiatives. This has allowed us to improve the quality of our digital products and reduce costs”, said Atish Banerjea, SVP and CTO, Customer Organization.

Hello,  I’m  from  HCL!  We  work  behind  the  scenes,  helping  our  customers  to  shift paradigms  and  start  revolutions.  We  use  digital  engineering  to  build  superhuman capabilities. We make sure that the rate of progress far exceeds the price. And right now, 90,000  of  us  bright  sparks  are  busy  developing  solutions  for  500  customers  in  31 countries across the world. How can I help you?

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