McDonald's deploys Manthan's Astra

BANGALORE:
Manthan Systems today announced that McDonald's has selected Astra as

its enterprise performance management solution after a testing it for six

months.






McDonald uses Astra's retail centric performance management methodology to
provide managers with a mechanism to communicate strategy, allocate resources

and monitor progress of execution teams.






Explaining the application of the product, Anand Sri Ganesh, director, product
strategy and marketing, Manthan, said that one of the challenges facing

businesses today is the gap between strategy created at headquarters and

execution of specific initiatives. Astra fills this gap, and helps retailers'

measure effectiveness of strategy execution.






Astra is built on a key business models and methods such as Scorecard/ balances
Scorecard, Benchmarking/Comparisons and Causality Analysis. These business

models and methods are then applied within the context of retail and consumer

goods industry.






It provides a systematic approach to deploy, communicate and effectively execute
plans and tools to manage the execution of initiative, track the initiative. It

mainly benefits customers in strategic resource deployment, he added.






Atul Jalan, MD and CEO, Manthan, said, “The roll out was kicked off for the
German and Austrian operations of McDonald's in around 300-400 stores. After a

seven-month deployment and rigorous user-evaluation process, it is now being

rolled out to their Spain, Russia and the Pan-European markets.”






“The Astra pricing model is in the range of $0.25 million to $1 million
depending on the complexity of solution provided,” he added.






Other than McDonald's, Manthan has two other customers one in US and in Europe,
where this product is deployed in 2000 and 6000 stores respectively. The company

is targeting to expand to 10-12 customers in a year.






Manthan Systems is targeting to achieve revenue of $15 million, for the fiscal
2006. It derives 100 per cent revenues from overseas market. Talking about

deploying its products to Asian markets, Jalan said, “The retail structure is

just began in India and so it takes time. I am very keen that even the Asian

markets especially Indian market derive the benefits of the these products.”






"According to the analysts the global potential market for retail sector is $35
billion. We will create a history for ourselves and we are proud to announce

McDonald's as the customer for Astra,” said Jalan.






Apart from their self-funding, the promoters have opted for debt funding from
SIDBI. “We have the option to convert the entire funding either into debt or

equity. We will go in for next round of funding to fuel our growth,” he further

added.






Sebastian Ajou, senior executive, project sponsor, McDonald's, said, “The
product has delivered a visually rich method of defining and tracking

performance improvement initiatives; building on our existing data warehouse and

reporting environment. This roll out will significantly improve our capability

to execute strategies and initiatives more effectively”.






© CyberMedia News