2013 is when we initiated working with HALL & PARTNERS, an advertising and media research company. H&P was a critical client win for Ugam, as it had the potential to be one of Ugam's top 5 MR clients provided we do all the right things.
The challenges were plenty though, understanding expectations of a new client, the challenge of competing against various vendors thru bidding process and then winning those projects, the challenge to set up a team on a totally new data collection platform (Askia) and all also face many unknowns which we experienced once we started working with them. However, with all these challenges we were successfully able to scale the operations and today support more than 50 projects per month, that means we scaled a team from 12 in Mar'13 to 90+ employees as of today, and with all this we are now standing tall as a reliable partner for H&P in just one year’s time.
This is the only team in the history of Ugam to have achieved revenues of over $1 mn in just one year and with a potential to double or more in the next 2 years. In addition to growth on H&P account, the Askia team is equally impressed with Ugam’s efforts over past year and is recommending Ugam's to their customers.
CategoryTeam Award
Sub CategoryProcess Improvement
WinnereBay Solutions Team
Team MembersAnand Rai, Pradeep Kokitkar, Parvez Kutchhi, Rajesh Singh, Siddhartha Uthayakumar, Vivek Yadav, Alagiri Vasudevan, Guru Balraj, Raguram Thangavel, Navin Jaisingh, Kowsihan Pitchukutty, Marshal Maria Anthony
CitationEBay is one of our largest customers and last year we started seeing a sharp decline in the size of engagement with them. We realized that the way out would be to engage with new groups within eBay and approach them with “solutions” solving their larger problems rather than approach them with our regular “services”. A dedicated team was setup for this and setup against a target of adding a top line of US$0.5 mn for FY 14-15 with them. In a matter of 2 months this team designed and worked out concepts of about 8 solutions and ideated them with pertinent eBay teams. The eBay teams were impressed with the solution designs and by Feb 2014 this team had generated interest from eBay groups to engage financially with Ugam for these solutions in 5 out of 8 cases. This team also generated 4 new opportunities in the process.
Come Apr 2014 this team has signed up US$ 200K+ of revenues with eBay for FY 14-15 and has a pipeline of US$ 200K+ more that can potentially convert. Interestingly these solutions have also helped us “Change our customers perception” about us as a “Solutions Provider” from a “Services Provider”.
This team started with practically no exposure to solutioning and has had to do a lot of learning in unfamiliar areas of analytics, technology, design, etc. However, over these trying months not only have they pushed the boundaries to learn these disciplines, delivered their goals but also set a solid pedestal for us to accelerate our business growth within eBay. A big round of applause for this awesome performance.
CategoryTeam Award
Sub CategoryTarget Achievement
WinnerRule Engine Team
Team MembersDevendra Mahajan, Mehul Parekh, Sunil Kumar, Veeresh Gutti, Piuysh Srivastava, Sudhanshu, Vishal Vaibhav, Jayesh Iyer, Abhishek Rajpurohit
CitationThis team has built one of Ugam’s core differentiators in the insights and optimization solutions space – a real time dynamic rules engine – as a core platform component. It is currently live and has helped positively impact the clients’ daily sales for their key value items to the tune of about $200k. It has helped us win $400,000 per annum contracts so far with many more to come.
This team encountered, and overcame, several challenges, simply through sheer hard work and dogged determination. This team ramped up on a brand new technology stack, dove head first into deep waters on the domain front, and had to contend with complex rules and algorithms that constantly evolved as we worked with our customers – and all this with 75% of the team being new to retail, and new to Ugam. They’ve had their fair share of lessons learnt and in burning the midnight oil, (and also burning their fingers on occasion) – imagine having to manually reverse engineer calculations for a hundred thousand products on a daily basis for 4 solid months, to ensure that the algorithms were built correctly and could handle constantly changing data conditions. This spirit of dogged determination and constant learning is an endearing quality that is also their core strength.
CategoryTeam Award
Sub CategoryProcess Improvement
WinnerInvoicing Project (ERM + FIN + Ops)
Team MembersERM: Abhijeet Bijoor, Hifzur Khan, Sandeep Dixit, Ajinkya Vaze, Amit Dixit, Shyama Balan, Rohan Thorat, Gyanendra Dwivedi, Madhu Raj Ojha
FIN: Anjali Butani, Amir Abbas Sayyed
Ops: Sagar Kotian, Bharat Bhat, Kiran Shetty, Anand Agrawal, Shahan Degamwala, Harish Mendon, Gaurav Jagtap, Rajinder Josan, Pradyumna Mohapatra
CitationThe team has helped in preparing a consolidated Invoicing System. The features of this system are:
1. One Day Invoicing
2. Centralized Future Proof Invoicing System which can easily integrate with Finance ERP systems
3. Saved 50% effort of COE team on Invoice generation
4. Centralized place for Finance to access all Invoices
This has been a collaborative effort of cross functional teams thereby enabling to build a system by which has now enabled 1 day invoicing across >80% of all invoices sent
CategoryTeam Award
Sub CategoryProcess Improvement
WinnerJDPA Onsite Consultants (SP)
CitationThis team played a key role in meeting JDPA Next Gen goal for FY13. It would have been a very difficult journey for JDPA if our onsite consultants would not have been around. They helped JDPA on all the critical aspects, right from questionnaire designing to survey programming standards and shell, defined key processes that need to be followed at various stages and across service lines. They also identified the processes that can be automated and provided inputs at every single step to process automation team.
JDPA’s entire SP technology transition operations are managed by onsite consultants. They play a major role to address their internal operational challenges and provide effective solutions.
Initially this role span was only for 6 months, however they increased the span to 2 years.
CategoryTeam Award
Sub CategoryProcess Initiation
WinnerTeam Unite (ERM + TM + KM)
Team MembersERM: Anupriya Srivastava, Shashikant Sharma, Saurabh Dwivedi, Gyanendra Dwivedi, Rohan Thorat, Ashutosh Mishra
KM: Rodney Lobo, Chaitanya Gadiyar
TM: Ransy Chacko, Manju Solomon, Prasanna Ramamurthy, Elsa Shibu
CitationThis is for Implementation of Intranet and Knowledge Xchange portal.
With 30+ Leadership connect messages, ~25 Blogs, ~200 wikis, 3 Brown Bag sessions, 12 events, Average 3200 hits in a week, Brand Launch, HackFest coverage, Appreciations from Clients, Client Messages, Employee Celebrations and much more the Team has ensured that UNite becomes the platform for Ugamites to Connect, Communicate & Collaborate. With no prior experience on building and running an Intranet and Knowledge Exchange a lot has been achieved. Being an open source platform has also helped us save at least $50,000.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerCamilla Vaidyanathan (Solutions)
CitationCamilla front-ended winning Nike as the first client for Brand Insights. In many ways this wins helped define the contours of the current Brand Insights solution.
The obsession with solving the client need led to this 9/10 CSAT feedback in the first 3 months. The Nike engagement formed the basis for 2 significant marketing initiatives that were run in the 2nd quarter; the whitepaper & Ugam’s first webinar on the topic of MAP monitoring.
We have built an outstanding rapport with this team on account of good work and following it up with some great client servicing which has ultimately resulted in a 3x prospective growth in FY15.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerAbhijeet Bijoor (ERM)
CitationAbhijeet was instrumental in designing and implementing the Invoicing system including system workflows and modeling of all the different Invoices across RO, Projects and Retail. Making a system that is used Organization wide where each service line follows a separate process was the biggest challenge. Abhijeet worked with the COE team on normalizing processes & designing a system that could scale. The various models used & their standardization was perhaps the toughest part to integrate. Abhijeet has proved that how much ever complex the problem may be, a well thought approach can simplify it.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerViolet Goves (OEC)
CitationThe Language Logic team within OEC is known for extremely meticulous work required and high quality levels demanded by the client. Violet has been an integral part of this team as a first time right coder. She is the only one in the OEC team of 40 whose work is sent without QC with limited audits. She has exceeded her Productivity, Quality and Utilization targets throughout the year in FY 13-14. With her efficiencies, Violet is able to add half a man month to OEC capacity. The consistent performance she exhibits has helped set a benchmark for the 50% new team to aspire to achieve.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerVaibhav Bhat (Solutions)
CitationVaibhav was instrumental in setting up the Content ABC solution and played a key role in supporting the Assortment project in its early stages. His works were published through multiple whitepapers throughout the year.
More recently, he did an excellent job in leading the very complex Holiday Insights initiative. The magnitude of holiday insights projects was quite huge – 38 million records & 10,000 promotions captured for more than 13 retailers over 45 categories across 1.5 months. Apart from leads, this initiative helped in our positioning with analysts and industry experts. Internally This was Ugam’s Biggest cross functional team and Vaibhav lead from the front making sure that the Sales & Marketing goals set out for Holiday Insights project were fulfilled.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerDhruti Parekh (TM)
CitationDhruti is being nominated and awarded for the efforts put in to create and manage the pre-visa interview training session for Ugamites. These sessions had a direct impact on the business as we were able to get more business visas granted – the success rate went up from 60% to 86%.
More than anything else, this is being awarded for showing commitment, ownership and taking charge to be accountable, because she believed in the impact this would create.
To her, this was not any other training, but this was a way to see her directly contributing to the organization growth.
By awarding this, we wish to celebrate this alignment and commitment and sense of ownership.
CategoryIndividual Award
Sub CategoryIndividual Brilliance
WinnerSampada Tambe (FIN)
CitationSelf Starter and Independent, Works with minimum supervision, Has designed the entire BYOD and Telephone tracker for the telephone reimbursements giving details of the employee, expense amount, period of claim, telephone number etc. The BYOD and Telephone expense tracker enabled the employees to submit photocopies of the telephone bills and has made their lives easy. In around 3-4 months of joining, she has understood all our processes, policies, files, spine and tally and proved to be a quick learner. She has been a consistent outperformer, exceeding the expectations from her role despite this being her first year with Ugam. She has performed her work with minimal errors and minimal supervision.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryPush Boundaries
WinnerJitesh Marlecha (MR-Sales)
CitationIn order to develop and grow client accounts, it was really important for an account manager to strike a fine balance between managing both client needs as well as aligning it tightly with Operations. Jitesh has been successful in balancing both the Client and Ugam, such that it serves the mutual needs of both the parties. Jitesh really pushed the boundaries by supporting revenues worth $1.2 mn against a target of $529K i.e. he has exceeded his Revenue target by 128%. Jitesh has demonstrated a “can do” attitude and does not get discouraged when obstacles are placed in front of him. His attitude and professionalism are a motivating factor for the team.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryPush Boundaries
WinnerPriti Gupta (DP)
CitationPriti has demonstrated that “technology is a means to an end”. She joined as fresher, with 4 weeks of training on Quantum and 2 weeks on Sherpa/Ruby and through self learning she has been able to execute complex jobs across the platforms, Independently, within 1 year. She has proved that multiplatform execution is achievable and with her skills she has also helped in transitioning critical P&G trackers from IPSOS to Ugam.
He performance on some of her targets are as follows:
Utilization - 85%, Quality - 98%, On Time - 99%
Priti has truly exhibited the Ugam value of “Push Boundaries” by taking the responsibility to learn 2 platforms and pushed herself to learn it to a point where she can deliver results. In less than one year, she has scaled herself on 2 platforms, setting a new benchmark and all of this without impacting Quality, Utilization and Timelines.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryThink Customer
WinnerAbhijeet Patil (CI)
CitationAcross communication with our PriceTrac customers we often came across feedback where customers told us that they were not using our reporting dashboards. While they liked the data we were sending them and found it useful in their decision making, they found the process of logging in to the web based dashboards inconvenient. This problem was discussed within our team and we decided to try some “Push reporting” and “Alerts” for our customers. However these features were not ready on our platform and needed to be done in a way that would lead to more adoption.
Abhijeet was working with some of key customers directly and he took up the task of designing some of these alerts and push reports which were customized to the way in which merchants would like to absorb this data. “Power Alerts” was the name given to the program and it became an instant hit within the first few customers. These alerts were delivered via email and linked customers to the PriceTrac dashboard leading to an increase in adoption.
All of this was done by him over and above his regular rigorous job of managing multiple customer relationships and delivery for us. This program was later extended to all our customers and we made up for a lot of lost ground in the holiday season when we delivered these “Power Alerts” across a lot of merchants and analysts in client organizations.
Thank you Abhijeet for this awesome contribution
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryBe Accountable
WinnerArpita Sur (Solutions)
CitationArpita worked on one of Ugam’s first steps into a pure analytics project. SAS was used to mine over 75GB of data to generate insights and recommendations for Sizewise. Delivery planning and client communication was excellent. Schedules were clearly laid out and risks and delays were communicated to the client in a consistent manner. She worked hands on when needed and also travelled when required to ensure successful completion of the project. The client today considers us as a trusted partner. Taking complete ownership of the work, she helped generate $96K revenue for Ugam in 2013, with a further prospect of $100K in FY15 annually just from Neiman Marcus on account of Sizewise.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryPush Boundaries
WinnerRohit Gaikwad (FIN)
CitationThis year, we have seen a growth in all vendor-related and fund management activities. The addition of another unit (Bangalore) which was incorporated in July added complexities in terms of bookings, payments, fund management and all other co-ordination related to the same.
Rohit took up this opportunity and stepped into taking more responsibilities. He handled the entire day to day fund management efficiently ensuring sufficient balances in each of the units and entity. We have around 20 Bank accounts to handle. He took over the entire responsibility of managing the banking relationships. Liaison with them on day to day basis independently without any supervision. He stood up to take decisions and risks related to Investments activities for investment of surplus funds or redemption of funds as and when required. Our Investment Portfolio was handled with minimal supervision. Due to his timely decisions in making investments, funds were not lying idle in the bank and fetched good returns.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryPush Boundaries
WinnerAshish Kacker (Retail - Sales)
CitationAshish has put in tremendous effort and on-going success in opening client conversations with some very leading names in the business. These include Academy Sports, Sports Authority, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Adidas, Toshiba, Brady’s, among others. Ashish is relentless and has tremendous passion in attempting to generate sales. He builds phenomenal relationships with his clients who provide him references. The key takeaway here is that if you are passionate and determined enough, you can. In Ashish’s case it’s opening a client door… no matter how big the client brand is. This award for Ashish is to acknowledge and celebrate his spirit of pushing the envelope.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryBe Accountable
WinnerBhavi Gandhi (FIN)
CitationBhavi has independently handled the entire international accounting with minimal supervision. She was functioning with no supervisor/manager for almost more than half of the year. She helped in better Fund Management in US and UK ensuring smooth payments towards Salaries and other vendor payments.
Her successful and timely execution of Transition of certain payments from India to US, led to cost savings for the company of nearly $ 100K for this year.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryThink Customer
WinnerNeha Patankar (SP)
CitationHarris Interactive as a client has been extremely happy and satisfied with Neha’s work. More importantly, she has met the sky rocketing expectations of this client and truly deserves to be acknowledged for it. She has received at least 2-3 client appreciations each month across all 12 months. She is a fabulous survey programmer who provides so much value-add. She goes above and beyond the call of duty by:
• providing weekend/after hours programming support
• being direct contact with the client
• having a positive attitude in light of continual client changes
Neha also received Amazon Gift card of $100 from the client as an appreciation for all the hard work and support she provided. She has achieved YTD 80% utilization and NOT a single internal or external error reported against her. Neha is a true Ugam Champion and she truly represents the Ugam value ‘Think Customer’.
CategoryValues Award
Sub CategoryBe Accountable
WinnerDeepika Vaishnav (PM)
CitationTo succeed in the H&P Partnership, it was important that Ugam is seen as reliable, trustworthy partner who will help H&P emerge as a winner and stay competitive. Deepika was aligned on many of H&P complex projects, which ran across multiple countries, multiple languages and having to deal with many suppliers and translation vendors across the globe to serve the project needs.
Deepika managed all these challenges and enabled H&P get the desired outcome from their projects. She was able to build client’s confidence that Ugam can run and manage such large projects. This opened up avenue for Ugam to receive many such large projects from H&P which directly contributed to top line growth.
Deepika has shown that if one has the mindset to take responsibility and accountability despite the challenges and trying situations, one can overcome any obstacles and emerge a winner!
CategoryLeadership Award
Sub CategoryBudding Leadership
WinnerGirish Nambiar (SP)
CitationIn 2013, we started our engagements with 2 highly demanding clients - JDPA and Market Cast. To setup these accounts, Girish played a key role in scaling SP and DP teams from a size of 15 to 40 employees in just an years time, and generated revenues of $1 million against the target of $800k (@70% gross margin). In addition to these clients, Girish helped successfully execute TNS pilots, and also played a technical consultant role for Morpace and JDPA.
CategoryLeadership Award
Sub CategoryBudding Leadership
WinnerAnbarasu Reddy (DP)
Citation-Successfully managed 6 business units across 3 locations and 2 platforms
- Seamlessly transitioned 2000 hours of Quantum work on Dimensions
- Successfully lead the Hiring, Training and Absorption of Juniors (30) and laterals (40) for Ipsos DP
- Groomed 6 supervisors to take on extended role, and laid the foundation
- Created a culture of understanding client needs, collaboration and co-operation with the team, which resonates with our core value of “Collaborate to win” & “Think Customer”
MetricsFY 13FY14 TargetFY 14 Achieved
Revenue ($)500K1.4 Million1.6 Million
Quality (%)90%90%95%
Team Size30-70
On time (%)90%95%95%
Billable Utilization (%)60%70%80%
Gross margin (%)30%45%50%
Anbarasu has ensured and performed over the year such that, not only he grows but the team, i.e. each and every team member grows in the true sense, which is a true quality of a leader.
CategoryLeadership Award
Sub CategoryLeadership – Business Manager
WinnerUnnikrishnan Vasu (Survey Programming)
CitationUnni has led the Ipsos SP and QA team through technology transition (at the beginning of the year), to solving problems for clients (like faster turn-around, creating scale on short notice, managing critical end client projects, creating dedicated teams for specific products etc.) and through a sudden volume shift that saw the team break records for volume executed. The results have made for good reading – 32% growth on top line, 6% growth in margins, 15% increase in share of wallet.
As a leader, Unni has driven results by
-Providing necessary direction to the team, and building alignment to that direction across the team
-Building a team structure that could scale quickly, and then establishing a robust training and absorption process
-Defined roles and responsibilities and provided opportunity for people to grow in their roles
-Outlining clear measures of success and monitoring them closely
-Ensuring alignment at client end, across levels
-Pushing the team to deliver in spite of inexperience (30% of the team has less than 1 year experience) to manage increasing complexity
-Gaining client confidence in his ability to understand their problems and building solutions for them
-Thinking about future customer needs and engaging with them to validate
It is this consistent approach, focus on flawless execution and customer focus that warrants his nomination in the leadership category.
CategoryLeadership Award
Sub CategoryLeadership – Business Manager
WinnerPradip Bansode (Content Solutions)
CitationIn FY 13-14 Pradip played 2 key roles in each half of the year and led his teams to excellent performance in both roles.
In the first half of FY 15 he led the entire eBay team to a superb first half performance lauded by his customers and complimented with excellent numbers. He led this (at one time) 100+ team to delivering the revenues above US$ 2.25 mn a billing rate of US$ 13.7/hr and GM of 70%+.
In the second half he was tasked with a completely different role of leading a crack team to setup a “Solutioning team” focused on growing the eBay account and penetrating across more groups within eBay as also helping Ugam position itself as a “Solutions provider”.
Under his leadership he managed a team of 11 members with 5 solution mgrs each of whom worked to help build 8 new solutions concepts for eBay. Over the months eBay has expressed interest in engaging with Ugam commercially for 5 solutions. To date this team has booked revenues worth US$ 200K + for FY 14-15 already and has another US$ 200K+ potentially ready to convert.
Across these 2 varying stints he has demonstrated extreme adaptability and has managed to inculcate the same in his teams very quickly He has led from the front and is immensely respected within his teams.
In tough times he has been a strong task master as also a mentor in times where employees have looked up to him for guidance.
Congratulations Pradip on a phenomenal year of performance and more to come.
CategoryInnovation Award
WinnerReal Time (on-demand) Crawl Updates Team
Team MembersSudhin Varghese, Abhimanyu, Shajith Maniyath, Neha Joshi, Praveen Taur, Sorabh Sachdeva, Kusha Pande
Citation•Currently, hourly and daily crawls are the norm across all our competitors
•We are able to perform hourly crawls, but there is a lead time of 3-6 hours (from the time of crawl) before the data is available for processing/consumption
•The challenge here was to disrupt the market by going beyond hourly crawls and offer true on-demand crawls a.k.a. real time crawls
•This team has come up with the first of its kind, first in the industry – True on-demand, one-click crawl technology using event-driven data pipelines to track real time price updates and social signal changes
•This helps us differentiate from our competition and now the price insights are available in minutes vs. the earlier 3-6 hours
The concept, design and implementation of this cutting edge technology were achieved in just 4 weeks. With this Real Time Crawl updates, Ugam now has the potential to reduce our overall crawling costs by a further 50% over current levels. What this team has proven to us all is that “just because it looks difficult and complex does not mean that it cannot be done.”