Adhunik Group of Industries consists of companies like Adhunik Metaliks Ltd., Adhunik Alloys and Power Ltd. and Adhunik Ispat and Corporations. The group manufactures wide range of products in carbon, alloy, and spring steel.

In order to streamline and integrate the key business processes across its companies, the Group recently deployed SAP ERP ECC 5.0.

Business complexities

The top management at Adhunik Group felt the need for an ERP solution to enable them to penetrate into various other areas and sustain organic growth. To fulfill this ambition, Adhunik Group realised the need to deploy better business processes to support its finance, store, costing, procurement, production and project management. The group recognised that in order to improve these processes, it was imperative to resolve issues related to fragmented IT systems spread across multiple locations.

Informs Rajat Subhra Dutta, CIO, Adhunik Group of Industries, “It was a cumbersome process for the top management to access data as and when necessary. It was also very difficult to get exact pictures of our plants located at Rourkela, Jamshedpur and Durgapur. We needed to drastically reduce the complexity of processes and the operating costs of the multiple systems accumulated over the years.”

The Group was also facing problems in terms of stocks management at stores. There were instances when the top management was unable to access the procurement stocks, used and unused materials, product mix and pricing, which resulted into unnecessary expenses and reduced profit margins. The finance department was also burdened by the huge investment in terms of manpower during the auditing period.

Streamlining business processes

Adhunik deployed SAP ERP to automate and streamline key business processes such as sales and customer service for logistics, finance, stores, procurement and reporting.

The Group evaluated the ERP solutions from SAP and BAAN, before zeroing down on SAP. The Group chose PwC as its implementation partner.

“We wanted a strong solution with flexibility and the capacity to coordinate with other applications. As SAP has a large customer base and experience in manufacturing, we decided to deploy SAP ERP ECC 5.0. We have taken 50 user licenses at present,” stated Dutta.

The total cost of deployment of both hardware and software was around Rs1.5 crores while the software licensing cost them Rs 25 lakh. The solution went live on 16th February 2007. “Given the realities, we took a pro-active and strategic decision to align with industry leaders to deploy a highly integrated suite that adds value at every facet in our organisation,” maintains Dutta.

SAP ERP integrates key business processes

The deployment has immensely helped the top management to directly oversee the operations of stocks and procurement as and when necessary. The deployment has also helped the finance department drastically reduce their time wasted on auditing and maintaining financial records.

Dutta opines, “With its powerful, comprehensive functionality, SAP ERP has helped us expand our offerings, increase profitability and achieve significant competitive advantage through business-process innovation.”

The solution has integrated the Group’s key business processes across the head office, production facilities and branch offices located throughout India. The tighter integration of business functions and processes has led to real-time information availability, yielding superior productivity eliminating duplication and standardisation of processes.

It is also likely to contribute significantly towards optimisation of Adhunik’s supply chain, boosting user productivity and reducing the time-to-market of new products.