In Entrepreneurship

Excellent insights about Ramco Systems and how its trying to do a turn around by Ramnath Subbaraman of Forbes India.

Original Article:

The reason why its products scored low on usability had to do with Ramco’s culture. It had always been an organisation dominated by engineers—not least because its promoter Venketrama Raja, a chemical engineer from Madras University, had a passion for products and engineering, and has been closely involved in its operations. (Raja, along with Ramco Industries and Madras Cements, own 68 percent in the company.) And engineers aren’t always the best people to think of products with lay users in mind. So, one of the first things Aggarwal did was to stress on usability. He hired over 20 usability experts (Ramco employs around 1,200 people) and made it known that nothing would go to customers unless the usability team gives the go-ahead.

To score higher on usability means the product has to run on mobile devices which, in effect, means everything has to be on cloud, an area that Ramco was already focusing on. Since Aggarwal’s arrival, all the products are built for the mobile first—and they all have elements drawn from the services that define this era: Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and, of course, Google. So, an executive checks into an office using his mobile, enters a data centre or conference room using a QR code, uses the maps on his mobile to check on his customers in that location, much the same way one might check out restaurants and so on. (QR code, or quick response code, is a machine readable code, similar to barcodes, but can store more information.)

Importantly, there is more stress on marketing than ever before. Insiders say that when its products failed to take off in the market, instead of turning more aggressive, the executives turned more inward looking, and instead of stepping up the marketing efforts, started investing less on marketing. That has changed since Aggarwal arrived. The team is practically new. (The story goes that sometime after he took charge, he sent a mail to his marketing team asking for their views on a certain issue. Some responded, some didn’t. He asked the HR department to fire those who didn’t respond, saying, ‘if they don’t respond to their CEO, would they respond to their clients?’)

The new marketing office is nothing like the old—bright colours, exercise balls fill up the place, and the cabins are in the process of getting converted to meeting rooms. While Ramco had mostly avoided partnerships for marketing, it has now tied up with Eurocopter, the Franco-German-Spanish helicopter maker. (While Ramco makes enterprise resource planning applications, its focus is on the aviation sector. Columbia Helicopters and Air India are among its customers.) Gartner’s Padmanabh says that during its calls with Ramco’s clients, the feedback has been that it has turned much more aggressive, and that the way it has enhanced its products often draws comparison with SAP or Oracle.

The Crucial Piece of Change Management
Insiders say that these changes haven’t happened without a lot of heartburn. One employee complained that Aggarwal has always been in IT services and doesn’t understand that the products business is different—and might end up destroying the core strength of Ramco, its engineering, by changing too many things too fast.

Aggarwal is aware of the shockwaves that he has sent inside the company, but he believes he has done the right thing. Some time back, Ramco had invited a professor from Harvard, Boris Groysberg, who specialises in organisational behaviour, to help it through the change. The big learning from Groysberg, Aggarwal says, was that change, first of all, should be fast. Do it at one go, and be done with it (instead of letting people speculate what will happen next).

Groysberg also advised the team not to get too emotional about letting people go. “There was a fair degree of shock at the speed at which change took place. But now, the degree of acceptance is creeping in. There has been some pain. But, when we succeed in the market that pain will go away,” Aggarwal says.