HCLT Brochure: Dex one
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Dex One is a US-based marketing services company facing significant challenges due to a decline in print media and competition from digital channels. Their partnership with HCL aims to drive digitization, reduce IT costs, and expand their digital product portfolio, while achieving cost savings and improved operational efficiency. The collaboration has led to a 30% digital growth and a 20% reduction in operating costs, demonstrating the effectiveness of HCL's support in navigating the digital transformation.
HCLT Brochure: Dex one
- 1. Dex One and HCL - ACHIEVING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION through PARTNERSHIP & COLLABORATION. CLIENT BACKGROUND Dex One is a leading US-based marketing services company. Dex One’s 1,500 dedicated marketing consultants work with about 435,000 local businesses to create customized marketing programs to help reach their customers. Dex One has a wide range of products and services that help local businesses grow. This includes online and mobile-based search solutions, print yellow pages directories and voice-based search platforms. Its in-house marketing solutions include Dex-published yellow pages directories, which are co-branded with other leading brands in the industry, an internet yellow pages site ‘Dex Knows.com’ and a mobile application ‘Dex Mobile’. Dex also provides end-to-end marketing solutions for local businesses. Dex One’s digital affiliate marketing solutions are bolstered by their search engine marketing product ‘DexNet’ which extends client’s reach to their leading internet and mobile partners to attract consumers searching for local products and services. Dex’s current and future strategic intent and vision is - ‘Growth by capitalizing upon the digital opportunity and thus capturing a greater share of the client’s digital marketing investment’.
- 2. BUSINESS CHALLENGE The entire print and publishing industry is undergoing a substantial transformation. The continuing decline in the use of print directories, increased competition - particularly from existing and emerging online companies - and a continuing decline in ad sales due to ongoing weak economic conditions have made “digitization” not a mandate, but a condition essential for the very survival of any company in this industry. A rapid shift in the use of new devices, online mediums and social engagement is changing the face of marketing. Dex One was driving towards an inflexion point where only digital growth could help overcome decline. Additionally, a slow recovery in the face of trying economic conditions - with local businesses continuing to see ‘little to no' new business formation, no job creation and no injection of new capital and customers exercising caution and restrain in spending spelt further challenges. Hence, a steep decline in new revenue warranted Dex One to optimize their spend on operations. Dex One wanted to overcome these challenges by expanding their digital product portfolio. So that when the marketing dollars migrated from print media to digital media, they were well poised to capture more of the shift in spend. "We were facing two main challenges in our business. First, we needed to reduce our IT cost structure significantly to bring it in line with the declining revenues from the print side of our business. Second, we needed to revitalize and add to our digital product portfolio to reflect the rapidly changing nature of our business. We needed the right partner with a diverse services portfolio & willingness to invest in critical areas such as people, processes, and technologies. Today we believe HCL as our partner was undoubtedly the right choice” said Atish Banerjea, SVP and CTO, Dex One Corporation. ENGAGEMENT MANDATES Dex One’s overall objective was to drive “Digitization - both internally and externally” to create a significant cost advantage, backed by IT optimization. They aimed to do this in the following way: • Expand services and establish a full complement of digital products: Dex One was looking to rapidly expand digital offerings to increase penetration rates among consumers and expand share of wallet from advertisers. This would help close the gap, offsetting print losses. • Internal change and reorganization via a massive skills refresh: 700 professionals were hired with marketing, sales and digital development as key skill areas. Dex One was focused on building a high energy, digital savvy sales organization that was committed to winning in the market place. For this, they established a Dex One Sales Academy with an intensive curriculum that leveraged computer-based training. In addition, they provided consultants with iPads loaded with customized sales applications and digital web-based conferencing and provided them with a new CRM platform on salesforce.com. “Dex One needed a dramatic transformation led by a strong digitization drive, we needed to quickly revitalize our print based products and transform them
- 3. 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, Dex One Corporation. Dex One needed to drive flexibility, agility and process maturity, leading to faster turnaround time and significant cost optimization. Dex One aimed to add technical expertise and capacity to its product engineering and development teams, IT helpdesk support and quality assurance to support varied technologies, including iOS, Android development, data warehousing and business intelligence. “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,” said Atish Banerjea, Dex One Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “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.” AREAS OF ENGAGEMENT The Dex One HCL engagement was established to leverage best practices from HCL’s prior successful engagements and was further cemented on the basis of their understanding of the fundamental transformation sweeping the advertising industry as a whole. HCL in collaboration with Dex One effectively gauged business requirements - by interacting at all levels and with key functions across Dex One, performed a detailed as-is-analysis and built a suitable business case for implementing digital initiatives and developing and supporting applications. HCL supports several business functions including advertiser self-service, marketing, sales, production and CRM. HCL’s areas of engagement with Dex One include: • 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, working with Dex One, helped 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 Dex One locations and on-site support at eight key Dex One offices. • Implementing quality assurance for the enterprise suite of applications such as graphics and marketing systems, print and digital applications, mobile
- 4. 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 Dex One by implementing value portals and metrics program to gauge quality of deliverables and team productivity. Beyond this, HCL is continuously working with Dex One on executing the strategic vision of the company to keep Dex One a step ahead in the industry. “HCL has spent time understanding the industry and the marketplace; this is helping create new ideas”, said Atish Banerjea, SVP and CTO, Dex One Corporation. HCL in conjunction with Dex One has worked significantly towards providing a boost to their mobile capability working on areas such as application development, support and testing for iPhone/ iPad, Android and Blackberry, mobile web development and hosting for advertisers, mobile display advertising etc. The key implemented features include user activity analysis, user registration and other features such as managing and sharing favorites and reviews. Furthermore, HCL has significantly improved the application’s performance (from 35 to 5 seconds). HCL, working with Dex One is focused on relentless, continual innovation: • Digital innovation - new products/ platforms for Dex One’s digital business: Leveraging its Digital Media Lab, HCL and Dex One jointly analyzed industry trends, developed and/or showcased relevant solution accelerators around search engines optimization, online directories, social enterprise and mobile applications. Some key solutions proposed to Dex One from HCL include Mobile Augmented Reality, mobile coupons, N=1 Personalization, Socialytics, contextual browser, self-service advertising platform, optimizing social media strategies for Facebook/ Dex One’s 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 Dex One 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
- 5. - 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: HCL boasts of a solutions lab, developing solutions for critical client/ industry issues in all media domains. 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 Dex One 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” analyses - 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): Leveraging HCL’s transition framework ASSeT for Dex One’s transition, benefitted both Dex One and HCL in several ways:
- 6. - Overall tracking and monitoring of the transition through ASSeT transition monitoring tools - Structured ASSeT processes and templates for accelerating documentation, reviews and understanding Dex One’s applications and processes - Qualified transition managers to manage schedules, deliverables, risk, cost and resources - Seamless transition without any business disruption } Silent knowledge transition: Any transition always carries a risk of losing key resources in between the transition period. This adds an additional burden to accomplish the desired level of knowledge transition. HCL’s unique concept of “Silent Knowledge Transition” helped meet these challenges and ensure a seamless zero business disruption transition. “Innovation is really the critical component to any engagement, current innovation creates future value – HCL is doing exactly this for Dex One”, said Atish Banerjea, SVP and CTO, Dex One Corporation. 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). “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, Dex One Corporation.
- 7. KEY SUCCESS FACTORS Some key points that have worked well for this relationship are: • HCL, in collaboration with Dex One was able to demonstrate a superior understanding of challenges and issues and leverage its experience, process and frameworks to gain the confidence of key Dex One representatives • Constant communication established between Dex One and HCL at all times and stages in this relationship. • Joint solution development: HCL and Dex One 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. • HCL recommended and leveraged proactive solutions and continued ideation aimed at helping Dex One achieve their larger strategic objectives. • Metrics: 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. • Multi-governance model: HCL set up for Dex One a structured communications and reporting approach with project level governance, operational review and regular steering committee meetings. Key factors at Dex One that led to success include: - An experienced executive leadership and committed IT leadership that guided HCL all the way through the engagement ensuring each mile stone of the journey is a success. - A team that was ready for significant transformation, they knew they had to do something different to succeed as a company and they focused on how to be successful, beating the challenges that came along with significant change.
- 8. 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? www.hcltech.com