Mumbai based Nitco Tiles is a manufacturer of ceramic, vitrified and many other varieties of tiles. The company has four manufacturing facilities and a network of more than 550 dealers and over 5000 retail outlets across India.

As a fast growing business with an increasing range of products, Nitco Tiles realised the importance of augmenting their IT infrastructure and the company has implemented SAP ERP ECC 5.0 to achieve that goal.

Diversification of business

In order to diversify from its core business of tiles to other flooring solutions, the company knew that the old legacy system was not efficient enough. Also, on account of being listed on the stock exchange, a more transparent system for its financial transaction was required.

Says Satej Revankar, senior general manager, IT, Nitco Tiles, “Our old legacy system was not able to produce reports on time, making it difficult for our top level management to take the right decisions. Sometimes we were not even able to know the exact level of inventory which led to unnecessary stocks piling up at factory.”

Nitco wanted to redesign the key processes and decentralise decision making while introducing the right checks and validations to ensure seamless operations. As the company went public, it was essential for Nitco to maintain certain compliance standards and to overpower these problems, the company decided to go in for an ERP solution.

Roping in Coconut Software

Nitco was looking for a solution that offers comprehensive functionality as well as scalability, to match pace with the company's growth plans. The company evaluated ERP solution from Oracle but then it decided to go with SAP due to its experience in the SMB segment. Revankar opines, “We decided to go with SAP as we got some good references from other customers who are using SAP. SAP ERP solution is well ahead in scalability and comprehensiveness."

Coconut Software was hired to help in the implementation process at Nitco. The implementation caused the company Rs 1.2 crore and was executed within 7 months. Nitco selected an internal core team to work closely with the implementation partner. The company has purchased 50 licenses from SAP.

Nitco implemented the standard SAP ERP modules, including SD, MM, PP, QM, PM, FI and CO. In addition, the company implemented several other industry specific processes, such as segregation and tracking of products based on quality, production WIP tracking on shop floor, order based product costing and business and supply chain related processes in the trading division.

Inventory reduction with timely reports

The successful deployment has enabled Nitco to streamline the MIS timelines and now the monthly and quarterly reports are generated on time. The overall costs have also come down owing to the reduced inventory in the plants.

The order processing cycle of the company has reduced to 1-2 days from 3-5 days. There is a complete visibility of inventory, product costs, sales order status, product discounts, customer collections and outstanding before the top level management.

“The reduction in employee efforts in generating reports and reduction in manual intervention are tremendous which has increased the productivity of our employees. We are now moving towards business analysis and analysing the information related to the growth. We are planning to integrate the document management solution which we are deploying now with SAP ERP," states Revankar.

Nitco Tiles is in the process of deploying document management solution from Hummingbird and is also working on its intranet port. The company is rolling out workflow based solution using its email applications and portal solution.