"Filtering The Codes Was A Major Challenge"

Hindustan Dorr-Oliver provides turnkey solutions for liquid-solid separation applications for businesses like pulp and paper processing, mineral beneficiation, fertilizers and chemical processing. The organisation used to work on Powerbuilder 8, which was not able to sustain the amount of data generated by the business. It therefore, decided to implement SAP ECC 6.0 and started the process for the same in June 2007. Before implementing the SAP solution, the company reengineered its business processes to fill in the gaps between the SAP modules and internal systems. Ajay Khanvilkar, senior assistant GM – IT, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver shares his experiences with Biztech2.0.

Can you give a snapshot of the business re-engineering exercise taken up before the SAP implementation?

HDO is in the engineering vertical. There are certain processes that are configured in the SAP solution for the engineering vertical and there are also processes that have evolved over a period of time at the company. Now there may be a gap between the processes that SAP offers and those that the company uses. We did a ‘gap analysis’ to gauge the business process mismatch and then bridged the gap.

For instance, post the SAP implementation, a typical material procurement request goes through the following process: the project management team releases the list of materials to be procured by the engineering people; the purchase requisition then passes through three levels of checks in the engineering department viz. engineer, manager and GM; and finally it is routed to the materials management team. They float an RFQ (Request for Quotation) to the authorised vendor or other vendors. The vendors float the Quotation, the comparatives are prepared and the PO is created on the basis of the PR.

The three level material check system was absent in the manual system that existed before the SAP implementation.

How did you plan out the implementation with the partner?

There were six employees from the implementation partner’s side including the project manager and about 16 employees from our team, who worked together for this exercise.

The implementation was planned in five phases. The first phase revolved around the implementation partner understanding the company’s business processes, getting into the minute details of the functions, the business cycle etc. After getting familiar with the business processes, the partner started configuring the processes in the SAP solution. A presentation was then put up before the core team to verify the configurations against the directions given by the core team members.

The second phase included implementation of the configurations on the test server that necessitated master data creation like item master, customer master, vendor master etc. to create a booklet of the strategy of master data having the codes. Going further, the respective departments started creating codes. For example, the accounts department developed codes for assets, the purchase department created a code for the vendors, the marketing department developed a code for customers, the engineering people created the item master and lastly, some codes were taken from the legacy. All these were merged to create a new code, developed into templates and uploaded on to the test server. After this, the company started entering the transactions.

The third phase started with report generation. Reports were generated on a priority basis. The relevant departments checked and cleared them.

The fourth phase involved checking for any shortfalls. It was ensured at this stage that no data was missing.

The fifth phase was the ‘Go Live’ one. The company went live with SAP on January 3, 2007. Right now, there is a backlog of transactions waiting to be migrated from the test server to the production server, which will be over soon.

The ERP was rolled out at two locations that are connected on the VPN – the HO at Mumbai and the factory at Ahmedabad. However, there are plans to connect the Chennai location and other sites soon.

What were the challenges during the implementation?

During the second phase, the strategy was to extract the old code from the legacy for the purpose of data migration from Powerbuilder to SAP. At this stage, there was a lot of duplicate data to be dealt with.

The challenge was filtering out the duplicate codes. At the factory site, there were about 75,000 codes, out of which almost 50 percent were duplicates. We started checking these based on the item description. Sometimes it so happened that even if the items were same, the codes were different having brackets, ratings etc. The necessary changes were made and we came up with a new, filtered code.

The IT team worked jointly with the engineering department to make the required changes for the templates. After all this, the company was able to successfully deploy SAP ECC 6.0.