Mother Dairy Goes Big Bang With ERP

Mother Dairy is a brand that people in India associate with high quality dairy products, a name that speaks for itself. With a production rate of over 2.8 million liters of milk every day and a wide range of other products part of its stable, the dairy company’s operations are a complex web of intertwined operations.

A tightly integrated system allowing for seamless flow of information was what Mother Dairy required to help disentangle the mess that was created by disparate IT systems and applications running in silos.

Enterprise-Wide Visibility: Key Challenge

Multiple applications and a segmented environment with individual systems at the different units within the company was hindering real-time visibility into the company’s operations due to delays and inefficiencies in the information flow.“Details of accurate numbers of monthly financial cycles were difficult to get and all we could arrive at was an estimate. Annual closing took months and unit reconciliation was a herculean task,” explains Annie John Mathew, CIO, Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable Pvt. Ltd.

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Driven by the need for uniform, integrated applications across the company and real time visibility into the financial records, Mother Dairy decided to implement SAP ERP. The aim behind this implementation was to have one application that would meet most of the requirements of the organisation.

Solution Highlights

One of the key factors for the choice of SAP ERP was its robust inventory management and integrated financial costing system. SAP ERP was further expected to help in the purchase process, sales, planning system, quality management and plant maintenance.

A key feature of this solution was its ability to work with multiple database and platforms as well as scalability.

Big Bang Implementation

Mother Dairy approached the implementation with a ‘big bang’ approach. Despite the large scale, the implementation went live on the same day at 75 locations.

According to Mathew, the major challenge faced during the implementation was training the employees while also ensuring that work doesn’t get affected and business runs as usual. The implementation spread across ten months with around 60 members, part of the implementation team. In addition, change management was another issue that the company countered successfully along with its partner, SAP.

“We put emphasis on training considering the fact that the people going to be using this solution were used to legacy applications for more than 20 years and were naturally reluctant to change. Having a core team consisting of business users supported by the technical team helped as they were passionate about ensuring that the changes did not disrupt business operations,” explains Mathew.

Mission Accomplished

With the implementation of SAP ERP, Mother Dairy has been successful in reducing its monthly financial closing cycles by 50%, while cutting down the time spent on financial reconciliation of inter-unit transfers by 75%. The key objective of gaining enterprise-wide visibility was achieved with this implementation, with improved capital planning being another major advantage. Overall, what SAP brought to the table for Mother Dairy was low Total Cost of Ownership.

As part of its future roadmap, Mother Dairy is eyeing further leveraging the planning system and delving into analytics and data mining to realise the full potential of the ERP system.