Flat Products Equipments (I) Limited is into manufacturing of cold rolling mills and processing lines and related equipments. The company also exports cold rolling mills to foreign countries including Europe and US. With the growing demand for its products in the international market, the company recently deployed the SAP ECC 5.0 ERP solution to achieve operational excellence.

Delayed project delivery

To remain competitive in the international market, it was imperative for the company to be spot on with project delivery. However, the top-level executives were plagued with issues ranging from checking the status of various projects to taking prompt decisions. Managers were unable to generate finance, MIS and reports accurately and on time, leading to delayed decision making.

As Carasel D’souza, chief manager, IT, Flat Products Equipments (I) Limited, reflects, “Monitoring of projects is an important task at our company. We have three manufacturing facilities and it is practically very difficult to visit each location to monitor the progress of the work. We were using our own inbuilt software known as ‘Pradnya’ but it was not able to handle the growth in data with the increasing operations.”

Various departments at Flat Products operate independently, with about 20 projects running simultaneously. This created a lot of chaos and project delivery suffered. The company 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.

Collaborating with Caritor

After carefully evaluating their requirements, the company discovered that SAP ERP would be an ideal fit. US-based Caritor was roped in to help Flat Products implement this project. “We decided to go with SAP due to its flexibility and scalability which can cope with our ever increasing growth. Our internal core team along with Caritor took about six months to implement the whole solution. We have taken 100 licenses from SAP,” states D’souza.

Sales and Distribution, Production Planning, Materials Management, Quality Management, Finance, Controlling, Project Systems, Plant Maintenance and Human Resources modules have been implemented at Flat Products. The key challenge during implementation was codification of products. With no existing standardisation of drawing, material codes and with many long term projects running simultaneously, getting master data for all the projects based on drawings proved to be a difficult task.

Transparent system of project monitoring

Post-deployment, the top management can easily track the status of ongoing projects in real-time at the various manufacturing facilities. The entire process has become much more transparent, as the managers can generate accurate and timely MIS reports leading to improved decision making. Owing to a single integrated system and enhanced visibility across the extended enterprise, there is no duplication of material orders resulting in streamlined inventory management. The in-house core team takes care of the maintenance issues of the new solution, thereby saving a lot on recurring annual maintenance cost.

“The ERP implementation has been able to provide tremendous ROI in the first month and we are reaping the benefits. The solution has centralised our segmented systems. We are now planning to integrate AutoCAD in to this system. We are also simultaneously deploying document management solution,” concludes D’souza.