In an effort to centralise and streamline its disparate business processes and bring about greater transparency and efficiency throughout the organisation, ICOMM Tele Limited, a manufacturer of telecommunications equipment is currently deploying Microsoft’s Dynamics Navision ERP at its facilities.

Headquartered in Hyderabad, ICOMM has been in operations since 1989 and has offices spread throughout India at 12 locations which include New Delhi, Kolkata, Bhopal, Lucknow, Jaipur, Chennai, Tezpur, Bathinda, Jodhpur, Siliguri, Bilaspur and Trichy.

The company specialises in manufacturing optical transmission equipment, radio transmission equipment, access equipment, broadcasting equipment, broadband wireless products, switching wireless products, antennas, HFC products, cable head ends, VSAT and teleport Systems and building outside plant infrastructure and wireless and wire line telecom networks.

Inadequate Old Setup

Up until recently ICOMM had been using FoxPro based custom-built applications for its finance and accounting requirements. For the rest, the company relied primarily on MS Office applications.

Gopi Kilaru, VP, ERP & IT Services and International Business Unit, ICOMM joined the company back in April this year, informed that the legacy system was proving far too inadequate, especially given the increasing complexity of ICOMM’s inter-divisional business processes.

“We had a lot of chaos with the old system. For instance, in case of accounting there were situations where creating new invoices for customers would be difficult simply because users would forget to change the old invoice number and would not update it. Also with the old system we were not able to accurately track expenses related to processes such as material procurement and manufacturing etc. There was a great disconnect between different business divisions which led to a very ambiguous scenario,” said Kilaru.

Early Attempts

It’s not as if ICOMM didn’t try to do away with its legacy before. In fact the company always felt the need for a packaged ERP offering and even tried to implement a solution, but the attempt met with poor results. The company tried to implement 3i Infotech’s Orion ERP offering late last year but the project could not take off due to some user acceptance issues.

“As a company ICOMM was always keen on owning a good IT set up. However, the 3i episode set us back considerably and as a result, many of us lost faith in owning a prebuilt ERP and became very apprehensive about any new undertaking,” informed Kilaru.

Try Again!

However, under the new leadership of Kilaru, the company decided to try yet again and started looking for an apt offering. The company was looking for a solution which met the demands of discrete manufacturing business. It evaluated several packaged applications including SAP, Oracle and a few others from different vendors.

When B2B software approached ICOMM with MS Dynamics NAV offering and demonstrated the capabilities of the solution and informed them about the number of deployments they’d done within the discrete manufacturing space, ICOMM opted for Dynamics NAV.

“In addition to NAV’s track record, a key reason for going in with MS Dynamics NAV was the end-user comfort level. Because it’s the end users who use the system and they have to have a certain amount of comfort when using it. Because our users were coming-off of a Microsoft-heavy legacy, We thought that I’d be a good idea to go in with NAV as opposed to some other system,” informed Kilaru.

The Implementation

After the initial nitty-gritty’s of the project, B2B Software Technologies kicked off the deployment on May 16th 2007. The solution is going to be deployed across all of ICOMM’s locations all at once and B2B expects to finish the project by September 16th 2007.

The company is deploying all the modules that come prebuilt with the solution; these include Financials, SCM, Manufacturing, Distribution, CRM and HRMS. The Dynamics NAV also comes prebuilt with its native database and ICOMM intends to use the same for the project. As far as the hardware infrastructure is concerned, ICOMM will be using the same HP and IBM servers it purchased for the 3i Infotech implementation last year.

“We already have the necessary infrastructure and we just need to remove the Oracle database from the servers and optimise them for NAV. We’ll be using broadband connections for our networking needs,” said Kilaru.

ICOMM has availed 52 licenses for the ERP. When asked about the total cost of the entire exercise, ICOMM did not disclose the amount.