ERP

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Implementing an ERP System in a Multi-business Company in India: The Case of MBPEL†

Preeti Khanna* and Sandeep Desai**

Pune Based Marc & Brown Principles Enterprise Limited (MBPEL) is a flagship company of the 60+-year-old Marc & Brown Group (MB group). The company had a pan-India presence and also well established in Middle East and Africa. The MB group comprised over 20,000 employees and was present in more than 20 sectors. The company had 21 regional offices in India, and, employed over 7,000 people. Different business divisions of MBPEL were using different processes resulting in issues relating to uniform policies, procedure implementation, reorientation of employees transferred from one division to another, etc. MBPEL had always used home-grown systems, where the information and processes were handled in silos. To add to this, it was imperative to handle the changes in business laws and regulatory framework required greater control and standardization of business processes across all its divisions. The purpose of this case is to understand the importance of standardizing its business process in construction industry which are typically complex in nature due to its global existence. The journey described in the case has been one of the best projects as far as ERP implementation methodologies are concerns because of its clear business objectives, and the organization strategy to work around three important dimensions, i.e., people, processes and Information Technology (IT) platform.

* Associate Professor, School of Business Management, SVKM’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (Deemed-to -be -University), V. L . Mehta Road, Vile Parle (West), Mumbai-400056, India. E-mail: [email protected]

* * Chief Executive Officer, Darwish Cybertech India Private Limited, #25, Blue Ridge Approach Road, Blue Ridge-Paranjpe Schemes, Phase 1, Hinjewadi Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, Hinjewadi, Pune-411057, Maharashtra, India. E-mail: [email protected]

Case Study

Key Words: Business Process, Change Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Innovation, Technology Adoption

The flowing bubbly, clinking of glasses, music, and an overwhelming gatheringat the downtown at Hyatt Regency, near International Airport of Pune, onthat balmy Pune evening, seemed surreal. The atmosphere resembled the euphoria of a much anticipated reunion.

† This case examines the developments around the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System at Marc & Brown Principles Enterprise Limited (MBPEL), a Pune-based entity (fictitious for the purpose of this case). Furthermore, this case has been written only for the purpose of class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of the situations that have arisen as a consequence of the decision that has been elaborated upon.

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A raw energy pulsed through everyone who had gathered to celebrate success at Marc & Brown Principles Enterprise Limited (MBPEL). Senior members of MBPEL had assembled to mark the occasion. Those who were behind the success were being rewarded. There were smiles all around. The proud handshakes and nods of appreciation exuded warmth.

CIRCA, 2013

It’s not for nothing that a company survives for 60+ years under one promoter, and, still continues to deliver profits. The MB Group, which flashes the catchphrase ‘We build which last forever…’ has lived up to it and also holds the promise for future. But while the organization has progressed and grown into a corporate behemoth of today, it was internally hindered by age-old legacy systems.

It was, therefore, time for a whiff of change in systems and heterogeneous processes. And it brought the management to the moment when the ‘old’ and ‘new’must clash. There was a lot of resistance to change. And what followed was a series of searing debates on the various legacy systems and their bottlenecks.

CUT TO THE PRESENT (DECEMBER 2, 2016)

Resistance makes a change worthwhile. The people, who had once questioned the need for change, were nodding in optimism today. They were finally convinced that SAP was the future. It was an extremely challenging job to prove that automating the business processes by streamlining and integrating them with the help of best business practices was the way forward to accelerate any multi-pronged business.

Many key members of the project were thrilled by the success, recalled their memories of implementation process, a voice broke out in the background: “The success of this celebration is to this great team of MB Group who demonstrated their skills, attitude to change, invested (and not spent!) valuable weekends and holidays. A great team effort!”

THE BUSINESS CASE

BACKGROUND

MBPEL was a flagship company of the 60+ year-old MB Group. Company was having Pan India presence and also well established in Middle East and Africa (refer to Exhibit 1). The Group comprised over 20,000 employees and was present in more than 20 sectors. The Company MB specialized in construction, design, build and EPCI (Engineering, Procurement Construction and Installation) business. MBPEL was headquartered in Pune, India, and it had operations in over nine countries. The company had four major business divisions, namely, Engineering & Construction, Real Estate, EPCI, Interior and Architecture. The company had 21 regional offices in India, and, employed over 7,000 people. The turnover of MBPEL was INR 6300 Crore for the year April 2014 till March 2015 (refer to Exhibit 2).

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The top management of MBPEL opened up a debate in December 2013 on how they could revamp their 25-plus-years-old business processes to boost their various businesses.

Different business divisions of MBPEL were using different processes resulting in issues relating to uniform policies, procedure implementation, reorientation of employees transferred from one division to another, etc. MBPEL had always used home-grown systems, where the information and processes were handled in silos, and, the reporting

Exhibit 2: Total Revenue for Last 10 Years of MBPEL in INR (Millions)

Particulars Total Revenue

2014-15 63,000

2013-14 45,170

2012-13 57,599

2011-12 45,577

2010-11 36,151

2009-10 25,518

2008-09 30,771

2007-08 22,202

2006-07 17,336

2005-06 10,403

2004-05 8,443 Source: Company Data

Exhibit 1: Companies Owned By MB Group

Company Operations

MB Real Estate Developers Development of Luxury Apartments, SEZs for IT and IT Enabled Services, Development of affordable housing, Retail, Hospitality, Commercial, Leasing and Consulting

MB BOT Projects Limited Ports, Power Plants, Highways, Dams, Tunnels etc.

MB Solar and Energy Limited Bio-Fuels and Solar, Wind Mill Power Generation

MB Fabricators Limited Engineered Facades, Cladding, Architectural Coatings

MB EPCI Limited Power and Steel Projects

MB Interiors and Architects Interiors and architectural deliveries of pre-engineered buildings, Limited Factories etc.

MB Construction and Marine Works, Roads, Bridges, Tunnels, Pipelines, specialist Infrastructure Limited Foundation Works and Piling, Drilling, Grouting, EPCI for Oil

and Gas platforms, MEP Contractors for HVAC, etc.

MB Water Systems Limited Water treatment plants, Air and Water Purifiers, Security Systems

Source: Company Data

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was done in Excel. But MBPEL was a growing organization acquiring projects in different geographies, developing capabilities to handle newer product lines, and, employing people across nationalities. This asked for standard and best business practices across the organization. The changes in business laws and regulatory framework required greater control and standardization of business processes across all its divisions. Lack of integration was creating disconnect especially across planning, budgeting, procurement, inventory management and consumption and governance. This caused inconsistency in data, making it difficult to get a complete and consistent picture— for example, plant and machinery module was not integrated with capital assets. It became a challenge for timely decision-making to enhance the performance of capital assets or for that matter, the retirement of assets. The earlier home-grown and aging systems did not lend itself fully to a modern Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to cater to the needs of growing business in a dynamic environment such as addressing various geographical needs in the areas of taxation, powerful business intelligence tools, and governance structure to monitor key performance indicators of construction business.

Considering the exponential growth of Indian construction industry, it was necessary to improve in areas like productivity, quality, and timeliness of construction. To achieve these, the key enabler was to have reliable data on which companies could make long-term planning and ensure on-time deliveries with decent profits. MBPEL had understood the importance of standardizing or rationalizing business processes across the organization. It also felt the need to deploy state-of-the-art IT to support cost control, accurate planning, risk monitoring, etc.

Introducing standardized and state of the art processes for their business was, therefore, important to add fizz to the business. The organization saw increasing demand from individual business heads to have the same processes, including reporting, controls etc. Service divisions like Finance, Accounts and HR saw a greater synergy in terms of optimizing the resources if the processes were harmonized and standardized.

“Today, we are talking of US$5 bn revenue of MB group with an order book close to US$12 bn, and, considering our compounded growth rate of 23%, we need to deliver this in the next four years. To manage such an exponential growth and the amount of complexities and disciplines needed in different kinds of projects, it is needless to say that the need of the hour is to have common set of scalable and robust processes” said Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Mr. Srinivasan.

The MBPEL leadership team finally decided to standardize processes across all four divisions and formed a steering committee for subsequent action. The steering committee comprised heads of respective businesses, Group CFO, Group Head - HR, MBPEL’s CIO and senior members from other group companies. The underlying objective was to manage the business growth efficiently by deploying leading practices

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of infrastructure industries across all businesses. After a thorough study, the steering committee agreed upon implementing the best possible IT solution typically used in construction segment. It targeted solutions, which could give robust and scalable construction business processes (entire project life cycle) in a controlled environment and, more importantly, provide a solution to address the need of harmonization and standardization. The solution was to address capability of global taxation as MBPEL was present in the international market. These demands were realistic and MBPEL was aware that a world-class Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution would meet their needs. However, the steering committee knew it would come at a huge cost with implementation nightmares and social issues.

SELECTION OF PRODUCT AND IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER

MBPEL realized the need to adopt a world-class ERP system. It chose ERP product from SAP, AG since SAP/R3 was already established within six of the MB Group companies. It was also viewed as the best choice for the ECO (Engineering and Construction Operations) vertical since three MB Group companies in similar businesses had hugely benefitted with SAP. MBPEL’s objectives to have a common business platform and business functions were clearly defined.

MBPEL decided to adopt and utilize SAP/R3’s ECO solution specifically designed for construction industry. Considering the need to process huge volume of business transactions and real-time reporting, project performance was a major factor to decide the deployment of database. SAP’s HANA—High Performance Analytic Appliance— was chosen as the backend database to complement the need.

SAP HANA was an in-memory, column- oriented and relational database management system. MBPEL was one among the first sites in India with a large user base of over 2500, and it was one of the first infrastructure company in India to implement SAP on HANA. The overall cost of acquiring IT infrastructure which included hardware, networking components, necessary licenses, setting up of data centre and consulting for SAP implementation came close to US$3 mn.

The partner selection process was a crucial step, and, it was professionally handled by MBPEL. A detailed Request For Proposal (RFP) was made and responses were invited from SAP implementation partners on these processes (refer to Exhibit 3 for business processes in RFP). Most of the globally recognised enterprises with a presence in India participated in the selection process. All functional or domain-specific employees (Subject Matter Experts – SMEs) were involved in the selection process. These SMEs were highly experienced staff who had vital knowledge of cross-functional business relationships. Some of them even had hands-on experience of the old internal legacy systems. The selection process consisted of presentations from implementation partners on RFP response, solution maps, implementation methodology, timelines, etc.

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Twelve SAP implementation partners were asked to participate in the process. One of the big fours was finally picked based on their substantial global experience as the implementation partner. The methodology demonstrated by them was also appealing from the complex implementation point of view (see the evaluation criteria, Exhibit 4). The process of appointing the implementation partner took around two months.

FORMATION OF STEERING COMMITTEE AND PLANNING

It was important to have an effective steering committee in place to monitor progress and ensure the project was delivered successfully on time. The steering committee comprised of Project sponsor, CEOs of respective business divisions, Head of Services (namely, Finance and Accounts, Human Resource, and IT), Project Manager of MBPEL, Project Manager and Delivery Head from the implementation partner. Three CIOs of group companies were also part of steering committee to share their experiences and guide the team whenever required.

Mr. D. K. Roy was appointed as Project Manager of MBPEL to drive this initiative. Project team of MBPEL was made up of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from the

Exhibit 3: Major Functional Areas and the Business Process

Functional Area Process Name

Project Planning and Execution Project Cost Planning

Project Budgeting

Progress Monitoring and Control

Project Cost Apportioning

Project Closure

Financial Accounting and Costing Chart of accounts

Accounts payable and receivables

Bank & Cash Accounting

Tax Accounting

Asset Accounting

Procurement and Inventory Management Project & Other Materials

Capital Goods

Client free issues / Free Issues to Sub-contractors

Services Procurement

Inventory & Goods movement

Capital Assets Management P & M / Formwork Planning

P & M / Formwork Procurement & Deployment

P & M / Formwork Hire charge calculations

Sales and Billing Client Order to Cash Cycle

Source: Company Data

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respective business and service units. This team was responsible for the entire lifecycle process of SAP/R3 implementation namely, blue printing phase, participating in the workshops, module level and integration testing, data management and documentation.

The steering committee understood the complexity and magnitude of this implementation and hence, sensitized the importance of inducting the best of SMEs from MBPEL side to see the success of this implementation. Mr. Srinivasan said, “These SMEs were handpicked by the heads of business and service units and more importantly they were functional in their day-to-day activities. Their knowledge base was undisputable and knew the end to end processes and legacy applications very well. They were substantially eased from their existing functions and deployed in SAP/R3 implementation project.”

Forty five members were dedicated as a work team from MBPEL. Implementation partner deployed a 40-member team consisting of functional and technical consultants.

Characteristics / SAP Vendors

1. Organization capabilities

2. Customer Base India as well as International market

3. Customer base in Construction / Project related

4. Industry Experience of SAP implementation

5. Capabilities on HANA

6. Global capabilities

7. Case Studies

8. Project Management capabilities/expertise

9. Functional experience

10. Focus on business blueprinting

11. Approach and methodology to transform your business to SAP

12. Change Management

13. Functional Team Skillset / experience

14. Technical Team Skillset / experience

15. Training

16. Realistic Time

17. RFP Scoping has been understood

18. Templates / knowledge repository

19. Governance capabilities of the Implementation partner

20. Overall Rating

Exhibit 4: Evaluation Criteria for SAP

Source: Company Data

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The total project headcount at any given point of time was approximately 75. The structure and details of the steering committee is given in Exhibit 5.

Exhibit 5: Structure of Steering Committee and Project Team

Note: *Number of people working under each category.

Source: Company Data

PHASE I – PROJECT KICK OFF

After scrutinizing over 50 suggestions by employees across the organization, the project was christened as ‘UTKARSH’. The word ‘UTKARSH’ means prosperity in Hindi. Prosperity was associated with scalability in the business and also deliver high quality of projects using newly chosen ERP. Project UTKARSH was kicked off by Chairman and Managing Director of MBPEL, Mr. Sumit Parikh on August 24, 2014 and the project was slated to go live on July 1, 2015. The kick-off was attended by the entire senior leadership and the project team along with members of the steering committee. The vision of project UTKARSH was expected to enable:

• Improved efficiencies in operational areas and increased coordination amongst businesses.

• Early and quick decision making for better project delivery ultimately bringing in operational excellence.

• Implementation of best-in-class processes to recognize MBPEL as the best company to work with.

MBPEL’s leadership team along with the steering committee made an attempt to spell out some of the key drivers for success highlighted as under:

• Maintain operational flexibility and manage working capital efficiently to weather the current economic downturn.

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• Maximize utilization of capital equipment through continuous improvement.

• Create sustainable growth through continual improvement of our business processes, organizational drive on innovation and productivity and effective HR Management.

• Track complete information about each project including costs, forecasts, budgets and baselines.

• Reduce time and effort in monthly, quarterly and annual closing of the accounts and sustain compliance efforts through management of internal controls.

• Support growth through a scalable and extensible IT solution.

These key drivers were referred to during the implementation phases. The project kick off phase delivered an explicit document mentioning the various tasks required to be achieved with proper time-table. The tasks list included conducting as—is study (that is, requirement gathering), gap analysis with respect to the new product implementation, define to be processes, development and testing. The document also gave an insight into the role of the project objectives, project scope, roles and responsibilities of project team and tracking the project progress. There were many challenges faced prior and during the actual implementation of project. Most of them fell into three main categories—cultural, business and technical.

Mr. Srinivasan explained, “While the expectations from leadership team was to build a process driven application to support the scale of the business; business users were expecting robust, scalable and secured system with improved functionality. These expectations were realistic However, at the same time it was necessary from our part to convince business user community that not all the functions and processes which were seen in legacy might get the full appreciation.”

The stakeholders of UTKARSH were aware that the earlier legacy system was engineered to satisfy users’ on-going demand, and, at some point, it became impossible to maintain these systems and the same legacy system was tweaked and customized for various divisions, which called for software vendor maintaining various versions of software for MBPEL. This important point was sensitized time and again, and it was made clear to all team members to focus on the first objective of the project which was to have uniform processes across MBPEL. This would not only ease the implementation load, but also enable every user to use the same processes across MBPEL. The HR department, too, would find it easier to exchange employees from one division to another without any need of re-training employees. The steering committee members were part of the Change Management Board (CMB). The objective was to create end-user buy-in in the new working environment. The CMB participated in workforce transition assessment and conducted several workshops on the change management

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and imparted extensive education about SAP/R3 benefits and reasons for its purchase, brought out clarity about changed roles and responsibilities, engagement and accountability efforts.

Project Manager, Mr. Roy said: “SAP/R3 demanded highly structured and standardized business architecture and discipline in order to use the embedded processes effectively to monitor and measure the operational efficiency. To achieve effective implementation end users understood that their existing business processes had to be altered in order to fit SAP/R3 and eventually changing the way MBPEL does business”

This was achieved by using a workshop-based approach to understand business processes across divisions and restructure them accordingly. This was part of initial blue printing phase. Exhibit 6 and Exhibit 7 are included to depict the structured flow of UTKARSH implementation phases and Project UTKARSH timelines.

SAP/R3 on HANA was a relatively new platform and MBPEL was one of the first infrastructure companies from India to undertake implementation on this platform. HANA, being a new platform, there was a paucity of people of the required skill set. One of the group companies of MB made successful attempts to convert the existing reports and forms on HANA platform. This experimentation along with product vendor and implementation partner gave confidence to the project team about up-skilling of existing in-house team as well as providing external technical support from the off- shore centers of implementation partner.

Exhibit 6: Structured Flow of Utkarsh Implementation

Source: Company Data

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Another huge technical challenge was data migration from legacy to newer platform. The requirement from the new system was to retrieve old data from the legacy systems, which had to be normalized, screened and stored in a sensible data format. The duplication of data was a major concern. The data volume was mind- boggling and it was MB group read across multiple locations, 100-120 running project sites, vendors/sub-contractors and employee transactions (past and present). The biggest challenge was to see all the four businesses, locations and project sites to go live on the same day. The chosen day was July 1, 2015. This ‘Big Bang’ approach was adopted within India and plan, to roll out the implementation for international operations subsequently, were made. Implementation of SAP/R3 for a large and complex project of MBPEL needed greater attention to record potential errors or risks to avoid failure during the implementation phases; project team maintained and recorded in a greater detail. Microsoft Excel was used to maintain risk register. Every issue within MBPEL, which involved risks were catalogued and hence continuously reviewed. Some of the risks perceived during the implementation phase were mentioned below:

• HANA hardware and related setting up IT infrastructure on time was crucial from the successful delivery of the project.

• The resistance to change to new process methods by the key users.

• Data migration was crucial for on-going live operations. Legacy data was complex and had seen humungous amount of efforts to cleanse data to port this to SAP/R3.

Exhibit 7: Utkarsh Implementation Time Lines

Source: Company Data

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• Processes perceived for the projects are too many and complex and end to end user testing was seen as one of the bottlenecks.

• Inadequately training the workforce to operate the new system properly.

• Business users had many demands from new SAP/R3 and many of them were crucial to go live. Convincing business users and prioritizing their demands was itself seen as a big task.

• Project was slated to go live on 1st July 2015, which was falling in the first quarter of fiscal year (April 1, 2015 – March 31, 2016). The project may impact on MBPEL’s end of year accounts.

PHASE II – SYSTEM DEFINITION (BLUE PRINT)

In this phase the scope of MBPEL’s SAP/R3 implementation was clearly defined, which led to the creation of the ‘Business Blueprint’. Business blueprint was a detailed documentation of MBPEL’s requirements and business processes in a standard format. Activities carried out during this phase of the project included reviewing information flow, understand in detail business processes, review policies and procedures, external system interfaces etc. This phase was very challenging and a trend setter as it had to accommodate the need of all businesses. During the phase, the project team also aimed at standardizing and harmonizing the processes across the business divisions. Various workshops were conducted between the representatives of business divisions, which then arrived at consensus to meet the prime objective. This process had four step as under:

• In the first step each division demonstrated on the drawing board current business processes.

• The second step was to arrive with each of the business unit at each of the process level identified the commonality and agreed on the single process.

• SAP/R3 processes were looked at the third step to borrow the best practice maintained in the product and adopt the common development process (if needed).

• The last step was to document these agreed processes, and if any development is agreed upon, then document the same.

Project Manager, Mr. Roy observes “In my 15 years of my SAP implementation experience, it was the first time that I was amazed to see this kind of a motivated project team and the best part was SMEs were completely empowered by their leadership to take the decisions in harmonizing and standardizing the processes”.

PHASE III – ENVIRONMENT DEVELOPMENT

This phase was crucial from design and software development perspective. This phase was aimed to lay down design and software architecture. This phase was created to

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build systems environment and also the way MBPEL would like to adopt the new working processes. In this phase, both teams, MBPEL’s internal and implementation partner’s functional and technical consultants worked on the following tasks:

Three SAP/R3’s environments were deployed namely, production, quality, and development. Production environment was required to run the live operations. Other two environments i.e. quality and development were typically meant for testing the various business scenarios and also used for training (of SMEs and end users) and development was for constructing the entire solution.

• Data Migration as per SAP/R3 templates.

• Development of various documents, which were mandatory to go live. For example, purchase order, cheque printing, good receipts acknowledgment, and invoice to the customer.

• Development of the reports for operational working and key reports for management decisions such as tax / excise register was required for operational purpose and cost to complete report for management decision making on what could be the cost of the project at the time of completion.

• Enabling the business processes by developing them using ABAP tool. These processes were not provided in SAP/R3 and were crucial for achieving go live.

• SMEs and Business users were given the appropriate roles not only for executing their own business processes but also ensured that they have access only to their operational reports. This was to ensure respective users would execute respective transactions from the new system on the day to day basis and also ensured the implementation of internal control from the perspective of Segregation of Duties (SODs).

• SMEs and business users played pivotal role in creating test cases and executing them. They were involved in creating real life test cases and advising both the teams about the live scenario and then execute the same on the quality environment to simulate the live experience. This helped project members to gain confidence in the construction of the entire system. Test cases were preserved for training purposes. During the testing phase, users were testing all the processes in their assigned roles. Systems integration testing and user acceptance tests were simulated in the live operations in the quality environment of SAP/R3.

PHASE IV – END USER TRAINING

Training environment was created to ensure users were able to simulate their day to day operations during the training programs. This exercise was confidence building

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exercise and was immensely useful to demonstrate other important features such as global taxation, financial consolidation and reporting. This phase was very critical as the adaption of the process, and the training really was the test of the successful change management program. SMEs from project team played a substantial role to impart the training to their respective user’s community. Imparting training to regional offices and over 2,500 business users of concurrently running 100-120 projects was a real daunting task, and used technology driven training methods such as video conferencing, WEBEX based sessions, distribution of training hand-outs containing screen shots, tutorials etc. The training covered all the locations in India and was imparted on SAP/R3’s FI/CO (Finance and Costing), MM (Material module covering Purchases and Stores operations), PM and ETM (Plant – equipment maintenance and scheduling module), core HR module covering employee joining and transfers, PS – Project Systems covering end to end life cycle of project execution such as budgets creation, entering the daily progress, advising the measurement relating to the work done by sub-contractors. SD – Sales module covering how to create customer contracts and thereafter, generate customer bill. Training was conducted on the individual’s roles and responsibilities. For example, if a particular user was supposed to co-ordinate with supplier in sourcing operations, then the user allotted only purchase related transactions and testing. Hence, training was conducted only on these transactions or on the required processes. Training sessions were conducted on the test cases, which were prepared during the phase of environment development.

PHASE V – CONFERENCE ROOM PILOT (USER ACCEPTANCE)

Related key users got involved for the period of 3 weeks during the implementation cycle to test the end to end processes of SAP/R3 system. This was the major task to ensure all the processes were in place and key project members were regarded as spokespersons from users and management side to comment on the suitability of the system in live operations. Thereafter, these key members were supposed to drive the operations using newly build processes. A Pilot was conducted on the live data consisting of masters and transactions to simulate or experience real life operations. All the key reports were released during the Pilot phase and ensured no issues come up in the routine documents or in the reports.

PHASE VI – GO LIVE PREPARATION

The final preparation involved daunting tasks: India office of SAP conducted a thorough audit of the production environment from the go live perspective. This audit process ensured all the parameters relating to databases were appropriately/suitably set to take care of transaction load, related databases were normalised before the live transactions were processed. The next step was to transfer entire processes and reports, which were specifically tailored for MBPEL. They were transferred from quality to

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production environment. SMEs and business users worked extensively to cleanse master data and open transactions. This data earlier was thoroughly tested and approved by the respective user and the same was uploaded in production environment. Uploaded data was validated by the respective user and confirm correctness. A crucial step was to ensure that all the users were defined in the final production environment with appropriate roles. Considering the user strength and dispersed locations, this period was regarded as the most stressful period of the project from further co-ordination point of view. A Help desk was setup and all the contacts of help desk were released to all the users to ensure un-interrupted support.

PHASE VII – GO LIVE

Earlier, the go-live date announced during the kick-off was July 1, 2015, but the project was delayed by 2 months due to the following reasons:

• Legacy data cleansing had many issues such as duplicates, removal of the redundant data, confirmation of the data from the respective projects and regions.

• Many developments needed re-work at the last moment.

• Some of the key users were not able to participate in the final testing process due to official commitment.

‘Go Live’ was finally announced on July 1, 2015 and old legacy systems were discontinued to ensure no user would log on to the old legacy system and feed the data. Old system was kept open to the extent of viewing the reports. Go live posed some practical issues and listed as under:

• Some of the users were not defined.

• Roles were not maintained for some of the users; either some of them were not created properly or given appropriate rights for executing the processes and hence, users were not able to proceed in the system.

• Some of the document print programs had issues. For example, some of the region level taxation issues were not configured and hence, purchase orders to suppliers were not committed.

• A few of the issues were conceptual and resolved by the help desk.

Go live related issues lingered for about 15 days and were resolved towards the end of the month. New SAP/R3 is well accepted after 1-1/2 months of go live and its benefits over the earlier legacy system are evident.

REALIZATION

SAP/R3 was live since last 9 months (with effect from July 1, 2015 – March 31, 2016) and project UTKARSH started delivering the perceived benefits. All the four divisions