Lead

A diamond is forever

Dimexon Diamonds has streamlined its business processes across the globe with SAP ERP and the company is now in a position to take strategic business decisions faster and this has aided it in expanding its business says Mohd Shariff PA

For Dimexon Diamonds Ltd, a company that manufactures diamond products, the business applications used for various processes that ensure the delivery of the final product on time are its biggest assets. Post implementation of SAP ERP, ECC 6.0 has integrated Dimexon Diamonds entire business operations and the company has hardly faced any business downtime.

Today, as a leading supplier to mining companies such as De Beers and Rio Tinto, Dimexon has emerged as one of the largest players in the diamond trade. It has evolved into a global player in the diamond manufacturing and distribution business. In a market that demands quality above all, the company has earned a reputation for being innovative and being able to execute with impeccable precision and consistency.

Dimexon had multiple offices globally in China, Hong Kong and Dubai. These were running various in-house developed applications on disparate technology platforms making it difficult to consolidate information.

The company faced multiple issues that were affecting growth and profitability such as a multitude of legacy IT systems and a hodge-podge of infrastructure with different systems on different platforms, data inconsistency, lack of secure access to business critical information all leading to delayed decision-making. These issues were constraining Dimexon Diamonds’ vision and when it set a goal of becoming the leading diamond and jewelery company in the world it went ahead with standardizing its business process through automation. “There was a strategic review of business operations in 2003. The endeavor was to focus on profitable growth in diamonds through improved customer understanding, robust supplier relationships, manufacturing excellence, strengthen our downstream presence and have a robust IT system in place to support the business growth requirements,” said Satyanarayan B. Vice President-IT (CIO), Dimexon Diamonds Ltd. This IT strategy was reviewed and the company had to grapple with various issues such as inadequate control of IT systems, absence of system integration, data inconsistency, delay in reporting and decision making.

He added, “Our business is critical and we need to take stock every day. Earlier we did not have an IT department as such and each department had its own application that had been developed by the concerned department. During these era, people use to sit for a long time in the office to get the information in a single window and understand business critical areas.”

Over time, Dimexon became saddled with a number of small systems developed by different vendors and running on varied platforms. The management of so many disparate systems became a challenge and it was adding to the cost of the company’s operations. The diamond business is a highly transaction-oriented one and data availability is crucial. Further, given the high-value of the items involved, data integrity and accuracy are vital.

Evaluation time

Dimexon’s product was so expensive that even the mismatch of single piece would add to the cost of doing business in a substantial manner. Understanding this, the board called all the concerned business heads and staff for the evaluation session with Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Satyanarayan said, “We had brainstorming sessions on the evaluation of the ERP vendors and tried to understand which solution would solve our critical problem. It was a collective decision to finalize on SAP.” Additionally the company conducted gap analysis and how SAP could address the perceived gap. Since SAP did not have a vertical-specific solution for gemstones and jewelery, the company had to customize the package to suit its requirement. Satyanarayan explained, “Since SAP is a scalable solution, we thought that it can scale to our expanding business.”

Dimexon handles more than 100,000 diamonds every day across its supply chain. All these items whether they are in sales, purchase, production and transit needed to be tracked at all times (because diamonds are expensive). Additionally the company felt that SAP’s ERP solution was a robust and proven software solution with all the modules and the ability to be integrated with key business processes. To leverage the benefits and derive more from the implementation, Satyanarayan said, “While there have to be systematic procedures and practices in place, one must also integrate people with the technology vision. Project management, which includes managing the top management, the IT team and the departmental heads as well as the right kind of change management initiatives and training sessions, become important.”

Dimexon finalized SAP ERP ECC 6.0 in 2006 and implemented it across all its business locations viz. India, Dubai, Hong Kong and China. The project went live on January 18, 2007 across its business operations. It implemented the Sales and Distribution, Materials Management, Production Planning, Quality Management, Finance and Control and Business Warehouse modules.

While explaining the key aspects of the implementation Satyanarayan said, “The SAP implementation at Dimexon was a top-management driven initiative. All departmental heads had to make sure that the end users were satisfied with the changes being effected and that understanding or process changes were to their satisfaction.” Here the company had a simple policy wherein they decided that they would not go live until the systems were fully and rigorously tested by core team members for various test scenarios under an integrated environment. It was only upon acceptance by business heads covering their business perspective and end users that the solution was rolled out. Such an approach also helped a lot in server sizing and ensured that the servers were configured according to well-defined specifications and that connectivity was in place.

Online availability of information

Deriving immense benefits from such an intricate and exhaustive SAP implementation became paramount. The company prefers to term the clear and tangible benefits as the outcome made possible due to dedicated efforts, planned training initiatives and sustained top management participation.

Satyanarayan said, “There is still a long way to go before we realize the full benefits of the SAP implementation as we have not completed one full cycle of SAP deployment.” However, some benefits are already evident. The biggest benefit is the availability of online information and in real time. According to Satyanarayan, “Today, real-time information is available across all the business locations. There is greater data accuracy. Inventory control has become streamlined and manageable. Accountability of stocks across the supply chain has become much easier now leading to better control.”

95% of the company’s employees are women, and they work out of three-tier cities. Now employees are completing the same work that used to take 8-9 hours before in 5-6 hours. Stock taking and checking across its business operations and supply chain has resulted in savings of 35-40 man-days a month. Each department can now share information with others about critical activities and departmental heads can keep track of each sale, the status of procurement, payment schedules etc. Importantly, the top management can now review all business critical information instantaneously, which is available to them online at any business location. Moreover even when the business head is traveling he can access business information through a specific URL.

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com