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Bajaj Electricals, a known name in consumer electronics for almost 65 years in
India, was
confined to legacy systems for most of their business processes. This was
causing hindrance to core business operations, as growth was fast but the legacy
systems weren't able to support it. At places, these systems were more than 12
years old and it was becoming costly and difficult to maintain them. Even the
supporting technology platforms had become outdated. Hence it was decided by the
management to initiate a project that will focus towards improving business
processes with IT systems. They decided to implement ERP, SCM, CRM & BI
applications together with complete integration taking a big-bang approach. The
Oracle Business suite of applications was selected for implementation, and the
project was named 'Project SMILE.' This is an acronym for the objectives to be
achieved:
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S – Simplify the business processes
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M – Migration to newer technologies
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I – Innovative and Integrated Business applications
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L – Create learning orientation across the organization
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E – to make entire organization Effective & Efficient.
Before implementation of this project, inefficient processes resulted in revenue
loss as there were no forecasting or planning tools available. Plus, legacy
systems were not built to support current business processes. These challenges
were overcome by implementation of the following products: Oracle E-business
Applications (ERP), Oracle Siebel CRM Applications,
Oracle Demantra Demand Management
Tool for demand forecasting, and on top of these apps, business intelligence
solutions like Oracle Daily Business Intelligence and Oracle Business
Intelligence Enterprise Edition for Sales Analytics, Dashboards & Reporting
(OBI) were also implemented.
Mr.
Siddhartha Kanodia, Executive VP & Head Corporate Service said "Project SMILE was
not just a plain vanilla ERP implementation. Besides financials, it involved
implementing and planning of CRM tools such as Demantra, Advanced Supply Chain
Planning and Siebel CRM. This called for a huge change initiative and I am proud
to say that the entire operations team at Bajaj Electricals embraced the changed
processes and leveraged the planning tools extremely well. The support from the
IT team also was more than commensurate to make this a possibility".
Post deployment, the company has been able to get the investment payback
achieved within the first year, and just from the savings coming out from one
module called Siebel Dynamic Pricing Module. The company can now make right
items available at the right time with
Advanced Supply Chain Planning solution, which has reduced the overall
inventory in the pipeline and also improve the company's ability to service
customer orders. The overall inventory losses have been brought down by 2% due
to this.
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