Oracle Solutions Lend Agility To Bajaj Electricals

Bajaj Electricals, a Bajaj Group company, mainly operates through its strategic business units namely Appliances, Fans, Lighting, Luminaries, Engineering and Projects, and Morphy Richards.

Inefficient business processes call for revamp

The company is more than 65 years old and has been using a legacy ERP system since the last decade. In the past few years, Bajaj Electricals has experienced rapid growth, which brought home the realisation that in-house software may not be able to support the fast cumulative growth.

The company also realised that some of its business processes were outdated and inefficient as they were designed around 12 years ago. Pratap Gharge, CIO and VP, Bajaj Electricals, says, “We did not want to merely replace software; our goal was to initiate actual business process improvements.”

PwC comes into the picture

The company decided to engage PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to conduct a study of all business processes, recommend improvements and also to suggest an IT solution architecture to support future growth requirements.

PwC identified various areas for process improvements like sales force effectiveness, streamlining pricing and discounting, logistics, warehousing and inventory handling, back office services, and product costing and sourcing. PwC also came up with a functional architecture supported by state-of-the-art application infrastructure.

The IT solution architecture recommended by PwC favoured various state-of-the-art applications from Oracle for different functional areas. These included Oracle ERP, Siebel CRM, Dementra for demand management, ASCP for supply chain management, Agile PLM and Oracle BI.

However, Bajaj Electricals did not accept the PwC recommendation immediately. “Internally, there was a feeling that we should also look at SAP as an alternative as some of our group companies were already using SAP,” says Gharge. To solve this conflict, the company decided to formulate a cross-functional team, which evaluated both vendors over a course of six months.

The conclusion drawn was that Oracle had certain best-of-breed solutions, which met their requirements precisely. Choosing Oracle would also help the company protect its previous investment in JD Edwards.

Project Smile – To bring enterprise-wide transformation

The company decided to go ahead with the Oracle suite and the initiative was named as ‘Project Smile’. R Ramakrishnan, executive director, Bajaj Electricals, says, “Typically ERP projects are fraught with a lot of pain. We called it Project Smile as we wanted a transformed organisation with smiling employees.”

Project Smile embodies simplification of processes, migration to new technologies, enterprise-wide integration, creation of a learning organisation and an effective work environment.

The Implementation

In the first phase, the company decided to implement Oracle ERP (eBiz suite), some components of Siebel CRM, Dementra for demand management, and the Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) solution. The company also decided to implement BI components in the first phase.

The Oracle e-Biz suite includes typical transaction processing areas such as financials, sales and distribution, purchasing, inventory etc. Siebel CRM components are mainly targeted at improving sales force effectiveness. The sales opportunity management functionality of Siebel CRM will help various SBUs of the company to track sales opportunities. This will also enhance lead management by allowing sales leads generated to be deposited within a central repository and avoiding their loss even in cases where sales representatives quit the company. Siebel also has a trade promotion module, which helps to monitor the funds being used for various promotions. Its dynamic pricing feature is helping Bajaj Electricals to overcome billing errors.

While Dementra and ASCP are helping the company to balance supply and forecast demand, the BI tools were deployed to filter intelligence for the top management.

Going further, the company had to make new investments in hardware too as the existing hardware was not sufficient to cope with the new software requirements. The company has now installed Niagara-based servers from Sun Microsystems and is also using a cluster solution for automatic failover.

Software integration – A major challenge

To ensure the success of Project Smile, Bajaj Electricals chose Oracle Consultancy as the implementation partner and Deloitte as the change management partner. The company has already completed Conference Room Pilot Three, the next stage would be user acceptance and thereafter it is planning to go live in the month of April.

Gharge says, “The task of implementing three applications of such large scale simultaneously is obviously a daunting one. The process involves integration of different software, which turned out to be the key challenge. We had to make sure that all the software was communicating with each other seamlessly”.

Sujit Sahu, director-Sales Consulting-SCM, APAC, Oracle, says that some applications have in-built integration; for example, Dementra is already integrated with ASCP, while others have to be actively integrated. “We are currently taking inputs from customers and plan to provide a process integration pack, which will offer out-of-the-box integration in case of certain critical applications like Siebel CRM.”

Deloitte’s role will become important in the next stage i.e. user acceptance where it will have to conduct extensive training sessions for employees.

A lean and efficient organisation

Project Smile was envisioned to bring about enterprise-wide efficiency and agility. All the three solutions implemented in the first phase are expected to leave the sales force with more time for the core sales promotion function, strengthen the supply chain and improve overall visibility for top management. Ramakrishnan concludes, “On the whole, we will create an organisation which is quick, lean and efficient”.

The company is also planning to implement Oracle HRMS and Oracle Agile in the months to come.