Peer-to-Peer

Agrochemical ERP

Rallis India Limited went for ECC 6.0 after an excellent experience with SAP R/3 4.7. Intelligroup’s Uptimizer tool ensured a smooth transition. By Varun Aggarwal

With most companies having already gone through their first round of ERP deployment, they are ready for the next stage which involves a full-blown implementation. One such company is Rallis India Limited, a company into the Agri-input business, which has been using SAP since December 2003. At that time Rallis had gone live on SAP R/3 4.7. The company enjoyed its experience with the ERP system that it had deployed at that time.

“The period was marked by a series of business process improvements one of them being the radical reduction in financial closures–from an over 60 day baseline to under 12 days as we speak,” explains Rajesh Patel, DGM IT, Rallis India Ltd.

The impact of ERP on Rallis didn’t end there. From SAP R/3 4.7, the company decided to go ahead with ECC 6.0 with all the core modules like Financials and Controlling (FICO), Human Resources (HR), Materials Management (MM), Sales & Distribution (SD), and Production Planning (PP), Quality Management (QM), Plant Maintenance(PM) and Project System/ Investment Management (PS-IM). The trigger for the upgrade to ECC 6.0 actually came from the positive impact from the deployment of SAP R/3 4.7 coupled with the additional benefits anticipated from deploying the SAP NetWeaver platform that will permit seamless integration with new products like Business information warehouse (BW), Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) and Enterprise Portal (EP).

For this kind of upgradation, Rallis was looking at a competent services partner that would help it ensure a smooth upgrade. After a series of evaluations, the company chose to go with Intelligroup as the service partner. “Intelligroup’s proprietary tool, the Uptimizer has been an integral part of the process in ensuring that the upgrade is managed seamlessly along with Intelligroup’s experience in assessing and managing upgrades. To empower people and business processes with the best of technology we went for mySAP ERP 2005 the latest SAP solution powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform,” adds Patel.

The deployment

The implementation took off in April 2007 and took only nine weeks to complete. The deployment went ahead in a phased manner with a number of software engineering methodologies put in place. The project followed the recommended methodology of preparation, blueprint and realization, upgrade realization, final preparation and cut over and go-live, for the staged implementation.

A review committee was constituted with the DGM IT of the company as the chairperson and key functional heads, project manager as its representatives.

“A core team with a project leader, functional and technical consultants mapped to the team at Rallis, working in tandem with the review team as per the set milestones. The team ensured that fixed resources were dedicated to the project throughout the upgrade and regular monitoring was done to ensure that timelines and milestones were met. The team also ensured flexibility in the ramp-up of some key resources as and when needed to carry out key tasks like functional testing,” explains Anil Puskar Director, Intelligroup.

The new mySAP ERP 6.0 system has now stabilized and in the coming months, Rallis is planning to leverage other benefits of the new platform as part of Phase II of the upgrade.

The Challenge

“The challenge stood in planning and managing the upgrade in a manner that allowed Rallis to go-live seamlessly and well ahead of the key selling season leveraging the added functionality of mySAP ERP 6.0,” says Puskar.

Another major challenge that stood in the company’s way was to ensure that the transition to the new system would entail minimal downtime. Also objects had to be optimized and parallel development (where absolutely essential) done. Thus, a special tool or solution was required to overcome these challenges. This is where the Intelligroup Uptimizer helped the company in accurately estimating the development effort, ensuring maximum coverage of objects and high-productivity at a low cost with minimum reworking.

Benefits achieved

Intelligroup completed the upgrade using its Uptimizer that helped plan, scope and manage the upgrade from SAP R/3 4.7 to mySAP ERP 2005 (ECC 6.0). Another noteworthy point was that it managed the simultaneous rollout of mySAP ERP 6.0 across all divisions, with the core modules of FI-CO, SD, MM, PP, PM, QM, PS-IM. In addition, the reporting requirements were met by custom development to align industry metrics with actual metrics.

The project delivered enhancements over the current functionality for their business needs with a roadmap for a functional upgrade as a follow-on to the technical upgrade. The successful go-live also resulted in better customer service and decision making thanks to better management reporting. This upgrade has therefore set the stage for plans to implement new components like CRM and BW to further consolidate the advantages received from this technical upgrade.

“Using the upgrade services of Intelligroup, helped us carry out this upgrade effectively, efficiently and on-time and on-cost with minimal disruption to existing business functions. In addition this upgrade from 4.7 to ECC 6.0, with all the core modules (FI-CO, SD, MM, PP, PM, QM, PS-IM) has also opened up the path to enhanced business capabilities that are provided through the mySAP ERP 2005 business platform for collaboration and responsiveness,” concludes Patel.