Arup Choudhury, senior general manager, IT, Eveready Industries, in an interaction with Biztech2.0 talks about the importance of IT for the FMCG sector and how it is enabling Eveready Industries to better compete in this highly competitive segment.

What are the latest trends in the FMCG sector?

FMCG companies are now looking more into the mobile devices usage to coordinate with the sales force. They are using handheld devices for order capturing and fulfilment by the field force. Business Intelligence is also widely used for analysing the data gathered from various transaction systems, into a central data mining repository and certain organisations are also experimenting with RFID for tracking of critical and high value inventories. There are also trends found in the GPS tools which companies are using for transportation management.

How important a role does IT play at Eveready?

IT plays a major role for any FMCG company. The key to the success of any FMCG company is to create a demand driven and customer focused organisation. IT helps you to achieve this by linking up the value chain end-to-end and integrating all the business process. It also helps you to understand market trends and turnaround with new products faster or remove obsolete products from the kitty. At Eveready, like any other FMCG company, IT is considered to be an important business enabler.

Eveready has deployed eFact for field force reporting and DAN system for quality testing. How has the company benefited from these applications?

In order to succeed, an FMCG company needs to keep track of the field force activities and the market trends. The eFact solution does just that. It is a sales force reporting system that integrates with mobile phones in the form of plain text SMS. With the help of this tool, each branch manager and the corporate sales team has information in terms of inventory and secondary sales at their fingertips beat wise. The performance of the field force is monitored on-line and paperwork has been eliminated. We will roll out the eFact application to all parts of the country. We also plan to set up a disaster recovery site in Delhi for our primary data centre.

The DAN (Data Accusation) system is deployed at all the 5 battery plants integrated with the production lines. This system tests the quality of the materials based on the parameters specified. The software readings are passed on to the assembly lines which automatically accept or reject the final product based on the reading.

Could you brief us on Eveready's BI strategy and how it is helping the company at a large?

Our BI strategy is divided into four broad categories. They are conceptual view, data architecture, technical architecture and implementation view. Conceptual view deals with a broad overview and diagram of what is required to be viewed by the end-users. Here we classify the BI into financial Intelligence, Operations Intelligence, Purchasing Intelligence, HR Intelligence and Sales intelligence. In each of these areas, users are asked to conceptualise the requirements.

In the next stage, we frame the data architecture. This is the place where the facts and dimensions are defined after talking to the users. The organisational and departmental KPIs are framed by the HR in discussion with the top management.

Based on the facts, dimensions and KPIs we define the technical architecture of the warehouse. At this stage, actual low level design of the warehouse takes place in terms of defining objects, creating item classes, summary views and drill down links. Technical architecture phase also covers sizing of hardware and bandwidth based on an organisation's requirements and number of KPIs mapped. At this stage, stage 1 and stage 2 are frozen.

Implementation view is to create the workbooks and scorecards based on the user feedback at the conceptualisation stage. As a part of strategy, it is decided that from stage 4 we shall not loop to stage 1 or stage 2 unless a completely new business requirement comes up and is justified by cost reduction or revenue increase.

These solutions are helping us create measurable organisational and departmental KPI, measure overall health of the company through management dashboards, perform what-if analysis, drill to details of a problem to do a root cause analysis and measure performance against KPIs. It is also helping to track important aspects of business like current ratio, AR turnover, day’s sales outstanding, revenue, expense, profit margin, contribution margin, supplier performance, working capital, WIP inventory trends and plan performance on a regular basis. We will be upgrading the Oracle eBusiness suite from release 11.5.9 to 12i to take advantage of the latest features in the coming days.