Imagine being a century-old company with a global footprint in the chemical industry with about 500+ employees, six manufacturing sites, and 15 offices. A multimillion-dollar industry leader in adhesives, resins, gel coats and functional polymers manufacturing. In this case study, we will shed light on the challenges the company faced before the upgrade and how Birlasoft addressed those issues with finality.
The Challenge
Here we list some of the challenges the customer faced in managing its international business.
Centralized Global Service Desk
The customer has its entities across the Middle East, South Africa, France, Ireland, Sweden, Croatia, the UK, and the US. With such a diversified footing, the company, of late, had been struggling with AMS Infor M3 from a centrally managed Global Service Desk. There had been a growing need for an onsite-offshore model to deal with issues specific to a region.
Unstable AMS service and Long Pending Issues
The company experienced unreliable AMS service that caused interruptions in business processes, more so as the issues got pushed to the back burner. Roadblocks such as these had negative impacts on operational and financial departments and forced them to handle their problems manually. Moreover, pending issues left its users dissatisfied as they lacked adequate knowledge and couldn't rectify the errors themselves.
Impeded Business Improvement Projects
The senior management team had been working on multiple projects to push their business forward but were held back by unforeseen events. The delays in implementation cost the company heavily in terms of finances, timelines, and manual efforts. For a long time, they were stuck with a regional third-party consultant in the UK that burned a hole in their pockets.
No Global Templatized Solution for Rollout
The customer counted on the availability of a global templatized solution for their rollout that never saw the light of day, which meant they were forced to carry out all their implementation in phases. As a result, the efforts put behind executing these phases were largely redundant and led to unnecessary expenses in dealing with more issues, not to mention the severely impacted operations architecture.
The Solution
The hurdles customer faced in managing its operations required an Onsite-Offshore model to reduce the impact on cost and timelines. Here's how Birlasoft addressed customers' concerns.
Infor M3 Upgrade
Birlasoft has had more than a decade-long engagement with the customer and has taken full responsibility for migrating them from Infor M3 old version to latest version, on top of providing them functional support since 2008. The upgrade to the latest M3 version brought various additional functionalities onboard, including (but not limited to) the Infor OS, an improved platform with superior capabilities necessary for any third-party integrations or add-on tools in the future.
The customer lacked a single-window solution for their problems, and Birlasoft delivered it at a competitive price point.
Multiple Environments for The Infor Xi Platform
Apart from the M3 upgrade project, which was delivered in 5 phases viz., Inception, Elaboration, Construction, Transition, and Go Live, Birlasoft was also responsible for developing three different environments of the Infor Xi Platform. These environments, Dev, Test, and PRD, included M3 and its peripheral systems and were per the best practice of keeping the development, testing, and production environment separate.
Unit Testing of Business Processes
Birlasoft performed the primary unit testing of major business processes and ensured that M3 worked with the migrated data. The goal was to verify that the integrations ran in conjunction across all the business process areas. The firm also ensured the GDPR data management functioned harmoniously after the updated integrations were established with the finance module along with other third-party tools.
Training the Trainer and Regular Support
The firm took the responsibility of training the Global Process Owners (GPOs) for using M3 as a part of the Infor Xi platform. In the process, about 15 GPOs were trained. On top of that, Birlasoft is currently providing support for any day-to-day issues across all business functions.
The Impact
Partnership with Birlasoft had a transformational impact on their maintenance imperative. While the upgrade was not so much on a functional level but technical, the GPOs were surely brought up to speed on the working of the latest Infor Xi platform.
The company's long-standing relationship with Birlasoft has helped them eliminate paperwork and manual administration for preventive and breakdown maintenance. As a result, the Infor upgrade can now gather insights about all maintenance trends, including equipment failure and different breakdowns, to prevent unplanned downtime. Furthermore, they now have increased visibility into the spare parts inventory, which helps them align reordering as per the needs of the production department. Not only is this helping them remain productive, but it is also ensuring that they remain compliant with all the local regulations and guidelines.
Again, since the upgrade, the chemical behemoth has reduced its Infor M3 improvement works to a substantial degree. Going by numbers, the customer has witnessed a 10% YoY reduction in backlogs, up from 7%, since they partnered with Birlasoft.
Birlasoft also helped them stabilize Infor M3 by rewiring various modules to improve MIS, which resulted in better decision-making. Moreover, the flow of information throughout all modules, including those related to finance, has been streamlined, reducing the third-party support dependency even further. As a result, the customer is now on the track of optimally utilizing the ERP solution and is now bearing fruits of the much-needed upgrade and support in terms of reduced costs and rationalized operations.
Other Case Studies
