Client is an international media and marketing research firm serving radio broadcasters, cable companies, advertisers, advertising agencies and outdoor advertising companies in the United States, Mexico and Europe.

The client’s core businesses are:

• Measuring network and local market radio audiences across the United States.
• Surveying the retail, media and product patterns of local market consumers.
• Providing application software used for analyzing media audience and marketing information data.

The client is in the process of rolling out a new media measurement system based on audio encoding approach, recognizing the need to develop alternatives to existing audience measurement methods. The application is in experimental mode currently, and implemented in two markets only. A market is a geographical location covering a major metro area in U.S. The client plans roll out this technology in 50 markets across the U.S. in the near future.

• Need for a completely new sampling methodology, to co-exist with existing methodology.
• Major change in the application architecture required, to ensure smooth scalability and desired performance levels.
• Interface between media measurement application, and the CATI (Computer Aided Telephonic Interface) application, to be converted from manual to automatic (Conversation between the 4th generation Web-based media measurement application and the 2nd generation CATI system, written in UNIFACE, posed a unique challenge).
• New application architecture expected to be robust enough to support 50 markets, 20 times more users and 50 times more data.
• Lack of clarity on the requirements and priority.

• Solution Envisioning Workshop (SEW) conducted with department heads and VPs to bring coherence of ideas and help visualize the desired business process and solution.
• Joint Requirement Planning (JRP) sessions held with the client management team, IT team and the business users. Solutions proposed, prioritized and documented.
• Application architecture changed to accommodate both, address frame and telephone frame based sampling methodologies (Flexibility to revert back from telephone frame based to address frame based architecture also provided).
• Methodology of implementation changed from Sprint to Waterfall (Sprint being typically suited for product development in small increments and not for major enhancements to be done in bulk).
• Regression testing of the system performed, so that both the systems can coexist simultaneously.

Cognizant also helped the client team with Program Management and integration between disparate systems like GDR, Data warehousing etc.

• Interface developed between media measurement and CATI applications ensured automatic data transfer, resulting in significant process efficiency improvement.
• Waterfall methodology resulted in process improvements over Sprint methodology, helping in faster construction and reduced cost of operations.
• Regression and load testing helped test system performance, and create a robust system.
• When all recommendations are implemented, the system will support 50 markets and 300 users, as against 2 markets and 15 users currently.
• Significant efficiency gains resulting from automatic interface between media measurement and CATI applications.
• Resulted in better Go-To market strategy, due to reduction in response time.