The textile division at GHCL Limited is a vertically integrated operation that manufactures premium quality yarn, griege fabric and home textile products like bed linen, curtains, madeups and cotton yarn. The two spinning units located in TamilNadu have an installed capacity of 125,000 spindles manufacturing 100% cotton and polyester cotton yarns.

In 2006, GHCL successfully setup a new mome textiles manufacturing unit at Bhilad, within the state of Gujarat. The unit has a production capacity of 1.5lac meters per day. It also trades home furnishing products in USA through Dan River and in UK through retail chain Rosebys through over 300 stores.

Seeking better control of expenses

Manufacturing home textiles is a complicated process, which requires coordinated planning, scheduling and monitoring at each stage of production. Also, it is difficult to track the work in progress at various production stages such as weaving, processing, cut and sew, packaging and shipment.

The in-house applications at GHCL were inefficient and did not provide real-time data, which resulted in GHCL losing control over its expenses. Raman Chopra, CEO, India Textile Division, GHCL Limited, states, “With the number of activities spread across regions, it is very difficult for us to be present in different establishments to take care of every matter.”

Deploying mySAP ERP to achieve business-level integration

“As we are growing our manufacturing units along with the distribution points across India and also in some foreign countries, we urgently needed an ERP solution to take care of our typical requirements,” observes Chopra.

GHCL wanted to select an ERP solution suitable across all types of business verticals with a methodical support service in place. The company found mySAP ERP ECC 6.0 to be the best fit that would allow enable them to implement a homogeneous platform across all the business verticals and achieve overall integration. The detailed implementation schedule was firmed up and the project was formally initiated on October 2006.

Informs Chandan Sinha, CIO, GHCL, “It was very difficult to automate the process starting from the yarn manufacturing to the automation of retail stores. Hence, we first deployed mySAP ERP ECC 6.0 at our manufacturing units and plan to take it up to other units.”

OBT Global Private Limited, a subsidiary of Zensar Technologies has taken the pioneer role in the process of deployment. IBM is the hardware partner and Reliance has taken care of all the networking set up.

The total deployment cost was around Rs 2 crore, with software licensing costing Rs 50 lakh.

Faster Decision Making

The implementation which went live on March 2007 for various units starting from sales, distribution, production plan, finance, costing to material quality recognition has accrued benefits in terms of team automation, process discipline, integration and online availability of information as and when needed.

The new system enables the company to incorporate organisational processes, such as planning of operations, forecasting seasonal demand, budgeting, material availability, measuring performance and reducing defects, minimising inventories and controlling quality within one system so that data can be routed and utilised wherever needed.

Opines Sinha, “The system offers the company an opportunity to cut costs, become more efficient, and deliver impressive benefits. The company is now in a position to re-engineer and automate its existing business processes to suit changing business environments. Post SAP deployment, leakages were plugged. Each of the company’s locations is connected and approvals are given online saving time, resources and reducing duplication of work. The system has brought in transparency permitting better and faster decision-making.”

“Since most of the information is online we can access it easily. Thus, at any point of time, if I want to know what were the prices or supply or demand last year, I can immediately access the information from the SAP system, which was not available earlier. This has led to faster decision-making. We are planning to extend the deployment to incorporate the retail stores situated outside India,” concludes Chopra.