Parle products aims to use IT to manage escalating advertising budgets

Parle Products is deploying an online advertising solution from Mediaware Infotech, to help get a grip on its media and advertising budget.

Advertising media budgets escalate every year. And advertising/promotion related activities demand a host of related tasks for monitoring media activities and expenses. There's a huge amount of paper-work involved in approving estimates and bills.

All this was compounded by the lack of timely information retrieval, ultimately affecting decision making with problems like tracking of consumption related to budgets.

Automation

So early this year, the Parle Marketing Team along with the IT Team decided to automate their workflow and database management related to advertising media. They also decided to introduce automation for receiving documents like estimates and activity sheets from their ad agency directly into their system, and perhaps approving them online. It was also necessary to automate the entire process right up to bill passing.

Solution requirements

Parle Products wanted the solution to allow the company to:

• Receive e-documents/reports from their media agencies, to minimize data entry.
• Send e-approvals to their media agencies.
• Receive Telecast Certificates (online) in electronic format and automatic bill passing based on 'spot appeared'.
• Transfer purchase vouchers and credit notes (online) to Parle's Corporate System.
• Generate up-to-the-minute reports on budget versus consumption.
• Implement flexible levels of security for sensitive activities like multi-level approval of estimates.

The solution

Based on the requirements, Mediaware Infotech proposed a solution. Microsoft's .NET platform and Oracle's database were chosen.

The project is under development and expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2004. Later, Parle Products plans to take up similar automation or below-the-line activities.

- Mumbai Bureau