The $4.5 billion Mahindra Group is among the top 10 industrial houses in India. Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (M&M) is the market leader in multi-utility vehicles as well as the largest producer of tractors in the country. IT has been an integral part of the business processes at M&M since the last three decades.

With the diverse sets of ever growing businesses, M&M needed effective tools to make right information available to the right people, at the right time and in the right format, to facilitate effective decision making. The company recently deployed SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW). Biztech2 digs into the requirements and benefits of implementing the BW.

Days of spreadsheet reporting

Earlier, the company used to aggregate information on various spreadsheets. Arvind Tawde, Sr VP and Chief Information Officer, M&M Ltd, explained that earlier users were downloading transactional data from SAP to Excel to meet their specific reporting requirements. Standard reporting formats were not available. It used to be difficult to evaluate multiple performance indicators simultaneously as data used to be in silos.

M&M runs SAP R/3 4.7 as their transaction processing system. SAP has some built in standard reports based on transactional data whereas organizational reporting requirements refer to consolidated reports with enhanced graphics. SAP’s BW is often utilised heavily by companies that essentially run their business on SAP operational systems. Explaining the reason, Tawde said, "SAP R/3 is a transaction processing system, if you really want to derive value out of it, you need to implement BW. Because what you need is information and not mere data."

Tawde feels BW is one step ahead as it analyses business information and presents it you in a format which is understandable and actionable. "We went for BW because it has a capability to get inputs from SAP system  as well as other non-SAP data sources. SAP BW now provides single view for all business related analytics."

Implementation across three major sectors

The entire project was executed in around nine months and went live on 26th April '06 before the target date of 1st May '06. Implementation involved three phases, information requirement collection, implementation, followed by extensive training and awareness.

The company had to deploy a separate server for BW application. It has already provided 850 analytics to various users, from the senior management level to operational. These analytics cover reporting requirements from various functional such as Accounts, Costing, Manufacturing, Sales & Marketing and others. Ravindra Dhawan, deputy general manager, corporate IT, M&M Ltd, informed that they are also targeting the data of group companies, so that the senior management who looks after the group initiatives can get real time information.

Training and awareness of large user base was one of the challenging phases of the implementation. "We had to concentrate a lot on the training part and it is still in progress," mentioned Tawde. Standardising the reporting format across the three different sectors was also a herculean task as the employees were using different formats for information collection, explained Dhawan.

Real time information optimises decision making

According to Dhawan, the biggest advantage of implementing BW has been the ability to provide single view of information to business decision makers. The system is able to talk with different sources like market research data, Supplier / Dealer management systems, Supply Chain system. BW has an advantage over the transaction processing system as it provides a multidimensional view of the same information. It uses several models like statistical, mathematical and simulations to provide a variety of analysis.

Dhawan informed that they have also activated ‘management cockpit’ for the senior management, which provides a tabular as well graphical view of the information.

Amassing more intelligence

M&M is now trying to build enhanced intelligence through exception-based reporting, condition-based reporting supported by appropriate alert mechanism. "For instance we are trying to incorporate capabilities such as alert messaging for senior managers whereby they can receive instant alerts about what's happening in the organisation. This sort of system can provide significant information like top selling dealers, non-performing dealers etc. In essence, we are trying to cull out more and more intelligence out of our existing set up," said Dhawan.