Recon Oil Industries Pvt. Ltd (ROIL) is a manufacturer and distributor of natural edible oil and food products. ROIL has a turn over of over Rs 30 crore and exports oil to 12 countries across the globe. The head office is located at Andheri in Mumbai, with branches in Delhi, Parwanoo, Cuttack and Hyderabad. Recently, the company deployed Ebizframe, a web enabled ERP solution from Eastern Software Systems (ESS).

Delayed delivery and raised costs

ROIL had some real plans to double its growth, by cutting down the operating cost and time. However, copious hindrances prevented the company from realising its dreams.

The foremost issue troubling the management was the prolonged material supply process. Receiving the material form the supplier, tracking the same at sub-contractor’s site and managing the sales, all resulted in delayed delivery of sales order. True inventory value was not known. Also, production cost was not available as the system was not integrated and centralised. The situation only worsened when the technical specifications followed by the production team, suppliers, sub-contractors and customers started running haywire. This in turn caused variations in the required and supplied material. All these hitches resulted in the customer rejecting the final product, thereby raising costs.

Informs Tariq Akolawala, assistant manager IT, ROIL, “Before implementing ERP, our company was using Foxpro based legacy systems for sales and accounting. However, to overcome the management issues, we mulled over eliminating the limitations in the legacy systems and providing flexible, integrated and real-time decision support. To enable the implementation of best business practices and improved business performance, we planned to implement a good ERP application.”

Factors In Favour of ESS

ROIL was using some DOS-based systems and Tally for its day-to-day activities, which required enormous manual work to run routine business activities. The employees devoted maximum time to data entry, resulting in redundancy and inaccurate data entry. Management had serious problems with decision-making, as right data was not available as and when required.

ROIL evaluated the ERP applications of vendors like Exant, Questech, Wings, SAP, Base Information, Int-view (PCsoft), before zeroing down on Ebizframe, an ERP solution from Eastern Software Systems (ESS).

According to Akolawala, “Deciding on an appropriate ERP solution was a difficult task. There are some factors which helped us select ESS. Being a CMM Level 5 company and having completed more than 250 successful implementations of their Ebizframe product in India, we thought they were the right choice.”

Ebizframe - An economical application

Ebizframe was adopted with minor customisation and major re-engineering of their business processes to improve overall performance. At present more than 40 employees of ROIL including head office, branch offices and production centres are using this ERP solution, deployed at a cost of Rs 13 lakh.

The deployment has resulted in remarkable improvement in the turn around time of delivery against order. The solution has enabled the management get crystal clear MIS reports of receivables and payables. As of now, Sales and Distribution (including exports), Purchase, Inventory, Production and Finance are live. The centralised system has provided for better and faster decision by management as DSS (Decision Support System) is available.

“We started getting ROI within few months of the implementation. Communication between employees has become easy and a structured method of work is enforced, resulting in a systematic work culture. Duplication of work has stopped, saving cost and time. So this particular solution has turned out to be an economical application for us. We are presently evaluating other technologies to take our ERP application up to the stockist level to tap secondary sales," concludes Akpolawala.

Currently, ROIL is focused at providing more depth to its production planning module and it is looking at more sophisticated MIS reports.