At a glance:
Division: Hero MotoCorp Central (national campaigns, launches, sponsorships)
Channels: TV, print, radio, outdoor, cinema, digital and sponsorships
Partners: five major agencies across media, creative, activations and events
Go-live: about two months
Outcome: 100% paperless within the first quarter
The challenge:
The central marketing team at Hero MotoCorp runs national brand campaigns, launches, sponsorships and media across every major channel, working with five agency partners.
Every campaign produced a paper trail of 200–300 pages: plans, purchase orders, proofs and bills. Approvals needed physical signatures, so when a signatory was travelling, a campaign could wait 5–10 days. Budgets, POs, billing and proofs sat in separate Excel sheets and email threads.
The result:
Finance spent 1–2 weeks reconciling documents for every campaign.
Agencies waited up to two weeks to be paid.
No one could easily check what was planned against what was delivered.
Leadership had almost no view of spend utilisation or return.
With five agencies running many campaigns at once, small delays turned into lost media days and late launches.
What changed:
Brandintellé set up one central marketing platform covering the full chain, from plan to bill passing.
Media operations: agencies upload estimates, and the team tracks and reconciles plan against actuals.
Digital purchase orders with built-in approval routing.
One approval engine on web and mobile, so signatories approve from anywhere.
Media billing that matches bills against plans automatically and posts verified bills to SAP.
Agency portal: all five agencies upload estimates, proofs and bills in one place.
Pre vs post analysis comparing planned KPIs with actual results.
TV monitoring that checks airing logs against agency data and flags missed spots.
Marketing finance view giving Finance the proofs, reconciliation data, JV numbers and payment (UTR) tracking.
The rollout took about two months, and teams were working in the system within weeks.
The results:
Approvals: 5–10 days → same day, often minutes
Reconciliation: weeks of manual work → automated, validated in minutes
Agency payments: delays of up to 2 weeks → cleared in 1–2 days
Spend visibility: none → integrated with SAP
Campaign launches: frequent delays → on-time execution
Paper: 200–300 pages per campaign → 100% paperless in the first quarter
Beyond the numbers, agency escalations stopped, vendors trusted the process because they could see status themselves, and the team stopped chasing signatures.
In their words:
“We use Brandintellé as our centralised system for managing and analysing marketing expenses. This single platform helps our teams by automating processes right from estimate tracking to bill passing with multiple deviation reports and dashboards. The agency portal enables our agencies to upload and receive all important communication via the platform itself. The integration with finance is also very helpful and facilitates quicker bill passing.”
Prashant Desai, Former Head, Media Marketing, Hero MotoCorp
Why it worked:
One record from plan to payment. Marketing and Finance look at the same data, so nothing has to be reconciled by hand.
Approvals don't depend on where people are. Mobile sign-off removed the biggest cause of delay.
Agencies work inside the system. No more chasing documents over email.
SAP stays the accounting system. Brandintellé feeds it verified bills instead of replacing it.
