Manufacturing

mySAP helps ABB increase employee productivity

Engineering giant ABB India was losing control over its expenses as its in-house legacy applications were inefficient and did not provide real-time data. Implementation of mySAP R/3 ERP and later mySAP (HR) have helped the company streamline its business processes and increase employee productivity

ABB India had developed a legacy application in-house to meet its financial, logistics and HR requirements. The trouble with the legacy systems was that real-time financial data wasn't available for decision making, as the legacy applications required manual entry and checking. It was difficult to carry out a yearly audit. Additionally, a lot of paper work was needed for supply management, order handling and HR. In October 1997, ABB decided that it needed a robust financial accounting and project management system. A team of six people was assembled, the team surveyed the company's requirements and it was decided collectively that ABB needed an ERP system.

Evaluation

During the evaluation period ABB found that Baan and SAP were the only vendors that had products that could fulfil its requirements. P V Kanagalekar, chief information officer at ABB India says, "Baan had strong expertise in operations and manufacturing but was lagging in finance and project management, which was essential for our business. The requirement gap was fulfilled precisely by SAP India. SAP also has expertise in localising products and a strong market presence in India." The decision to implement SAP was supported by ABB's headquarters in Zurich. In January 1998, the final approval was given to implement mySAP R/3 3.1H. In February, ABB formed an implementation team that included 12 business managers and another three from the Information Systems (IS) department.

Big bang approach

ABB took a big bang approach to roll out mySAP in 17 locations. The first was at Kalkaji in New Delhi with 70 users who went live in April 1998. This was followed with the largest location of ABB India in Maneja, Vadodara that covers 10 businesses of ABB with 250 SAP users. The project was started in May 1999 and went live in January 2000. This was a landmark achievement for the ABB team and it acted as a confidence booster for them. The team geared up to run multiple parallel projects and completed the rest of the implementation in six months. Two teams worked in parallel at the Chennai and Mahesthala, Kolkata locations. This was followed by six locations, one at the corporate office in Bangalore and five at ABB regional offices, all of which simultaneously went live on SAP in August 2000. Soon after the completion of the company's financial audit for 2000, the team was asked to roll-out mySAP at two more locations-ABB's factories in Andheri, Mumbai and Faridabad. Both these projects started in parallel in February 2001 and went live in July 2001.

Having successfully rolled out to other locations, ABB took up the roll-out of mySAP at its Peenya manufacturing unit at Bangalore, the toughest one of all because of the size of the unit. The project went live in five sites at the Peenya unit in April 2002. ABB India has a common IT platform on SAP R/3 version 3.1H, that runs all its business systems at its 18 sites. The project was completed in four years and today ABB India has around 1,300 SAP users.

Snapshot of benefits

Seamless integration of data from financial, supply chain, sales and HR. Real-time MIS reports can be generated to check inventories, receivables, expenses and profitability statements across all departments and location-wise. Employees can maintain their own records. Automation of HR has helped ABB to get rid of paper trails in HR. Financial audit can be done on a daily or monthly basis, helping ABB check productivity and revenue per employee on a regular basis.