Nominee

Unity after the diversity

Stand-alone systems are obsolete in today’s networked world. Efforts are being made to ensure that every entity in an organisation is connected at all times with emphasis laid on consolidating data. Wockhardt found that it's stand-alone systems exacerbated its troubles. The decision was made to consolidate operations across multiple locations and to protect the integrity of transactions. Wockhardt chose SAP for this

"IT has initiated the move from a legacy system to SAP. We were able to convince the top management of the need to centralise business applications such as SAP" - Suresh Shenoy VP, IT Wockhardt Hospitals

For a company that has 500 of its 4,000-plus employees based in international markets, consolidation of distributed systems was probably a major challenge. Bringing uniformity in such a distributed ecosystem would certainly seem impossible. However, the mySAP implementation at Wockhardt came up trumps to help them create a strong, robust, time-tested ERP system which transcends functions and processes, avoids duplication, provides real-time and accurate management information and offers operational efficiencies.

Suresh R Shenoy, Vice-president, Technology, Wockhardt says “IT has initiated the whole move of migration of legacy to SAP system. IT is able to convince the top management for need of centralising business applications like SAP to cater for its business needs.” Their legacy system was a two-tier Oracle Base System developed in-house. The database used was Oracle running on AIX and Windows System and front-end was D2K running on Windows Desktop.

Why SAP

Prior to the SAP implementation, the systems, generally referred to as legacy, were distributed across locations. Each location of data and application was like an island. Consequently, consolidation of data across locations was difficult. To add to that, duplication of work and reconciliation would happen at every stage. So legacy systems had inherent shortcomings and were not conducive to speedy and seamless flow of information.

To address this issue, the company has deployed mySAP ERP Enterprise ECC 500 version across its business operations in India and the UK. The modules implemented were production planning, material management, quality management, sales and distribution, finance and control plant maintenance, product life-cycle management, part of HR, business warehouse and enterprise portal. The integrated SAP modules are hosted on a centralised high availability server and provide a common platform for all transactions. Thus reducing duplication of effort, and saving time and resources.

The company started the implementation in May 2005 and completed it by January 2006. “It was the dedicated IT and functional team along with push from the top management that helped us finish the project in such short duration,” remarks Shenoy.

According to Wockhardt, 1,500 employees, 1,000 customers and about 50 people in the value chain have benefited from this project.

Core team of functional users across functions and locations was formed and were assigned to respective SAP modules. IBM was selected as an implementation partner. IBM assigned their consultants for configuration of each module. And then there was IT team for co-ordination and overall support.

The process

All the existing processes across locations were documented in detail. Then a uniform process was designed in keeping with the goal, future needs, best practices in the industry and provisions in SAP. This is an opportunity to debate each process in terms of efficiency, validity and re-engineering required if any. The finalised process document is called “to be.” It is also referred to as “business blue print.”

The SAP was configured to suit “to-be” and this is called mapping. In parallel to these activities, master data like details on vendor, material, bill of material, needs to be standardised across locations and duplications removed. This is loaded as the master data on SAP. All these are iterative processes. Also training is imparted to all users on their respective factions.

Future roadmap

Officials at Wockhardt confess that this SAP implementation was most challenging of all their IT implementations as core functional ownership was lacking and there was limited functional resources allocated by management.

In the future, Wockhardt plans the implementation of advance planning and optimisation engine for real-time planning based on real life scenario. They also plan to implement SRM (supplier relationship management) for controlling indirect purchases. They are planning to roll out SAP for their US business, while integrating the EDI and iMany chargeback systems and also for a business in Germany and an acquired company in Ireland.

The objective is to optimise and maximise benefits of SAP. As business transactions are increasing, e-commerce is also gaining importance. Integrating vendors, channel partners, service providers and customers with system requisite information security would be a challenge and opportunity to maximise the returns on SAP.