Customer Overview
Our client is the industry-leading OEM supplier of automotive products in the country, offering a range of solutions to every primary vehicle and engine manufacturer in India. The company provides the widest range of automotive products and solutions to every major vehicle and engine manufacturer in the Indian Automotive Industry, making it the country’s leading OEM supplier.
With the Birlasoft solution, the client could set up a standardized, cloud-based ERP business suite that allowed them to meet all their critical business priorities. With a flexible and resilient management system that could respond to every evolving business requirement, our client could manage and optimize their core operations and processes at every crucial touchpoint.
The Challenge
With its ever-expanding growth plans, the company needed help to meet its business needs with its existing ERP infrastructure. The ERP system being used by our client initially was a home-grown offering with the significant issue of a need for more scalability. A less scalable ERP system can have a negative impact on a business in several ways:
Growing business demands
Such a system cannot handle the heightened exigencies of a growing business, such as an increased number of employees, customers, or transactions. This often leads to slowdowns, errors, and other operational hurdles that can severely hinder the efficiency and productivity of the entity.
Remaining competitive
Second, a less scalable ERP system may not possess the necessary features and capabilities to support the evolving needs of the business. For instance, it may need help to integrate with newer technologies and business processes or more flexibility to adapt to permuting market conditions. This acutely limits the business's ability to innovate and retain its competitive edge.
Costs
Third, a less scalable ERP system is often more expensive to maintain and upgrade over time. As the business grows and its requirements transform, it may necessitate the procurement of additional licenses, hardware, or other resources to support the system. This can increase the overall cost of ownership and diminish the return on investment for the ERP system.
Overall, a less scalable ERP system can have a negative impact on a business by limiting its ability to grow and adapt, increasing operational challenges and expenditure while reducing its competitiveness in the market.
Birlasoft Solution
To address our client's business requirements, it was critical to carefully evaluate their ERP needs and select a system that could support their current and future growth plans. As such, the S/4HANA cloud-based ERP system was set to be installed for our client across all three legal entities possessed by them. All the best practices concomitant with this robust ERP platform were provided, offering an adequate answer to all their evolving operational demands.
Net New Implementation
The SAP S/4HANA software was deployed to migrate from the client's existing Softgen and Tally ERP systems. The new implementation involved defining the business processes and data supported by S/4HANA and identifying any integration factors. It also included configuring the system's core functionality, as well as any customizations that were required.
Standardisation of Processes
The SAP S/4HANA infrastructure was implemented in a standardized scheme across various workflows for our client in finance, manufacturing, and logistics, ensuring a systematized platform for all these domains.
Embedded Fiori
Fiori's modern, intuitive, and responsive UI framework was embedded into all the SAP instances in the ERP system. Based on HTML5 and other web technologies, Fiori was implemented to the fullest extent for a range of business transactions and data.
Analytical apps
Moreover, to enhance accessibility and productivity, an assortment of analytical applications were designed using the Fiori capabilities and made available on various platforms. It covered functionalities such as financial statements, MRP monitoring, and "My spend," among several other valuable offerings.
Successful Migration
By successfully migrating from the Softgen and Tally to the SAP S/4 HANA platform, we could develop a unified, well-integrated system with heightened visibility on operational data, allowing our client to efficiently calculate all critical SKUs across their inventory.
The Impact
The S/4HANA system was implemented parallelly across all three legal entities for our client and five rollouts in their warehouses. By replacing the erstwhile home-grown ERP solution within these eight entities, we were able to deliver a range of significant benefits for them, allowing the organization to meet the business demands that they were not able to previously achieve due to the lower scalability of the earlier ERP platform. Several critical operations and transactions were streamlined and expedited under the S/4HANA system, allowing our client to tackle all their priorities in an ever-altering business arena.
With the Birlasoft solution, the client could set up a standardized, cloud-based ERP business suite that allowed them to meet all their critical business priorities. With a flexible and resilient management system that could respond to every evolving business requirement, our client could manage and optimize their core operations and processes at every crucial touchpoint.
Improved visibility
With the new ERP system, the management could glean comprehensive, real-time insights from all its critical operations and processes, allowing key stakeholders to gain enhanced visibility across the entire organization. It empowered our client to debottleneck existing operational constraints and promptly respond to changing business milieus.
Improved efficiency
By implementing 100% Fiori across the SAP environment, we were able to ensure that our client could carry out transactions much quicker and with greater ease. This allowed several critical business processes to get streamlined and expedited, such as approving purchase orders, purchasing requisitions, or creating effective PR. Moreover, with the improved visibility, the new system ensured better planning and control for the smooth delivery, production, and procurement flow in the client's system.
Improved accessibility
Several Fiori-based analytical applications were integrated into the SAP platform, allowing users to avail a range of financial information and business data through various channels such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. As such, it improved accessibility for users for several critical day-to-day functions and broader business needs.
Improved subcontracting processes
The new system also ensured that the entire process of availing any product or service from a subcontractor was now mapped onto the SAP system. This facilitated the whole process and improved the organization's capacity planning.
