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March 16 2010

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SAP ERP Will Lead To Organic Growth In Our Company

Ankush Sohoni

Nitco tiles, a relatively new player in the tiles market, recently decided to implement SAP’s solution, in order to enhance the workflow and organization levels in their enterprise. Satej Revankar, GM-IT, Nitco Tiles, spoke exclusively to CXOtoday.com, regarding their decision to implement SAP.

CXOtoday.com: When did the company decide to opt for an ERP solution?

Satej Revankar- Well, we already had a homegrown mini-ERP, however, this system was getting unmanageable. Additionally, we also had a homegrown Foxpro based system with Visual Basic as the front end. In this case, too, it was the issue of unmanageability. Hence, faced with this situation, we decided to implement an ERP system.

CXOtoday.com: Why did Nitco implement an ERP? What were the driving factors?

Satej Revankar - Well, there were a number of factors that were taken into consideration. First, we had legacy systems that just were not delivering. The thing with legacy is that it can only do so much. Since we wanted to do more, and we were growing at a good rate, which is why we decided to implement an ERP system. In short, our growing business needs and the benefits drove us to begin ERP implementation.

CXOtoday.com: While considering buying an ERP did you evaluate other ERP vendors?

Satej Revankar - Yes. In fact we did evaluate a number of vendors such as Oracle and JDE, however, however, what SAP provided was exactly what our enterprise needed.

CXOtoday.com: But why SAP only?

Satej Revankar - SAP is well known in the industry as the numero uno ERP vendor. We decided that if we were getting into the project, we would associate only with an established player. However, that is not always the deciding factor, as was with us. SAP was also being used by our peers in the tile industry. We also were aware of the fact that the implementation of SAP would allow organic growth in our enterprise, i.e. our ERP will grow with our growing needs.

CXOtoday.com: What according to you will be the immediate benefits to be seen after implementation?

Satej Revankar - The immediate effects because of this implementation will be seen with regards to automation and integration of all our disparate systems. Our infrastructure is such that we have one manufacturing location, twelve depots, and four offices based out of Mumbai. After implementation, we expect to see all these locations integrated into the main system, which will allow real-time flow of data and also establish a workflow system of sorts. We hope to achieve a large level of transparency within our enterprise. We also expect our company to follow a best practice scenario after implementation, which will definitely change the way work is done in our enterprise. We expect our SAP implementation to be the platform for the next generation.

CXOtoday.com: What modules of SAP do you plan to implement?

Satej Revankar - As of now, we have decided to implement the core modules of the solution. We are also looking at SAP’s HR solution, and we plan to keep upgrading as we grow, which is the best part of implementing SAP.

CXOtoday.com: What other initiatives are you planning other than the SAP implementation?

Satej Revankar - Well, alongside our SAP implementation, we are also rolling out a complete infrastructure deployment, which will include disaster recovery solutions, backup solutions, and hardware upgrades. After the implementation is completed, which should be by October this year, we also plan to drive a SAP Business Intelligence initiative. Along with our current SAP implementation, we also plan to upgrade our ERP from Microsoft’s SQL server to Oracle.

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