Ishwar Jha VP, Business Technology Essel Group

Organisations are growing horizontally and vertically. Businesses are expanding in the global market space. ERP helps to control the business and provides a robust platform to run the business smoothly. It helps to analyse the past, control the present and plan the future course of your business.

For instance, with the help of ERP, the finance department knows about business requirements, viz., cash required to grow the business in the future. So they can plan and if the cash required in the future is more than what is available, they can apply for loans. If you need to be in business, you need an ERP system.

CRM: Capturing and keeping customers

Manufacturers have multiple clients at different locations, hence it helps the sales force to plan their order, schedule and manage their inventory. It controls and captures business operations.

CRM is highest in IT/ITeS companies as they have a direct relationship with enterprise customers. For instance, Zee Telefilms needs to communicate with its customers on a regular basis. This generally is over the telephone. Any downtime in connectivity therefore affects our business. CRM helps control, capture and monitor the customers. It tracks down the customer’s requirement. For instance, I can find out how many unhappy customers I have.

BI in FMCG

Again the usage of BI among the FMCG being high is quite obvious. In FMCG, the customer base is fragmented and volatile. These companies require BI software to understand the consumption pattern of the customers and to track usage patterns.

For instance a soap company will find out why a particular customer is using this soap.

SFA for networking

SFA would be most viable for pharma companies. With mobile phones, sales representatives can easily be contacted. Earlier it used to take months for sales people to deliver the reports to the organisations or a few days to get in touch with the HO.

In a pharmaceutical company, SFA helps the representative convey the feedback on a particular medicine from a doctor to the HO. Besides, it also helps him in taking orders and reporting the same to the HO within a few minutes.

Zee Network too has SFA in place. Our marketing teams are continuously trying to find out what time is best suited for a particular advertisement. For instance, women prefer to watch serials in the afternoon, hence we try and have related products being aired at that time.

Vinod Sadavarte, CIO- Patni

With optimised operational efficiencies and agility being a must have for survival in today’s competitive world it is not surprising that the bulk of the investments has been in ERP systems. Besides organisations look to save costs and automate and optimise their processes, which is possible with a good ERP system.

Applications like CRM and data warehousing depend on the need of the companies and hence in some cases these might not be a priority. For instance, a manufacturer of aircraft engines with a limited number of customers, might stress more on achieving operational efficiencies, lowering costs and getting higher quality, which is possible with a good ERP systems rather than CRM packages.

Besides, ERP has been around for more years than tools such as CRM so it is to be expected that the adoption of ERP is consequently higher.

Patni has been using Peoplesoft for Finance and HR for more than five years now and similarly, we have been using Siebel CRM for four years. These applications have helped in increasing the efficiency and efficacy of our operations. Today, our Human Resource Management (HRM) and finance and accounts are managed through the ERP system. Sales force automation helped us capture relevant information in a sales cycle from the lead to the final deal. We are able to more effectively track our sales process.

Role of CRM

CRM is becoming important for most companies, especially banks. Customised campaigns targeting niche customer segments are becoming the norm as the concern is to retain customers. Today, when you approach a bank to open an account or for any other purpose they ask for information including things like the age of your children. This information is then used to offer services like an educational loan. The idea is to lock the customer for life and utilise information for cross selling whenever the opportunity arises. That is where CRM comes in and helps to give you a complete picture of your customer and understand him in detail. The idea is to customise campaigns for your customers and give him the offer from which he derives maximum value.

BI in FMCG

Implementation of data warehousing and BI may be low because companies are often unsure whether the information obtained from such sources is going to be actionable. The high cost of some data warehousing packages also deter organisations from implementing these packages.

With strong competition in the FMCG space and a level playing field having been attained on parametres such as operational efficiencies and distribution strengths, superior business intelligence may prove to be the deciding factor. The current retail boom in India and the emergence of a consumer class necessitates that companies have a understanding of customer needs and preferences and target the right product at the right customer segment. Tools such as market basket analysis coupled with BI techniques could help organisations find out about the buying habits of customers.

Vikas Gadre CIO, Rallis India

Rallis implemented SAP in 2003. We have implemented 4.7 version of SAP. The SAP implementation covers financial accounting, sales and distribution, material management, quality management, plant maintenance, production planning, project management and costing modules. Currently we do not use any standard customer relationship management software but we have plans to implement the same.

ERP implementation has given us many benefits. The primary benefit is that it provides us with a unique version of the truth across the organisation. Time spent on reconciliation and disagreements between functions over the correctness of information has practically come to zero. It saves managerial time and unnecessary frustration. It has brought in transparency and uniformity in rules and regulations.

The total cycle time for information retrieval has reduced significantly. This is evident by the fact that during the current year, our annual accounts were completed, audited and the board meeting was held within 17 days after the close of financial year. This was a major change from pre-ERP days. (During those days the accounts closing could happen anywhere between four to four-and-half months after the close of the previous financial year).

ERP is the foundation for other applications that are integrated into it. In case of Rallies the investment in ERP was quite high as the entire infrastructure had to be built up from ground up. As a result; we had to invest in connectivity for all the depots, regional offices, factories and the head office. Having built up this infrastructure; developing a superstructure in terms of the CRM, SFA and such other activities are relatively easy because they will ride over the connectivity infrastructure already developed.

On the need for applications like CRM

I realise that major investments are happening on infrastructure development in retail, insurance and banking. India is also developing as a manufacturing hub for many things. This puts pressure on many Indian companies (other than IT/ITeS) to gain insights into the buying behaviour and patterns of their customers and consumers. Besides global competition is also a factor. Therefore manufacturing companies are spending more money on understanding customer behaviour by investing in CRM and other such packages.

We are in the process of implementing around 17 helpdesk call centres at various regional offices and important marketing centres. These helpdesks will provide farmers with information on agrochemical inputs. They will also be used for the purpose of collecting information from the field, which will be collated and analysed at the head office. Web-based helpdesk software linked with SMS will enable the compilation of nationwide information in knowledge nuggets which can be used by the senior management team in understanding activity at the farmer’s level. We will also have a better grasp of competitor’s activity and the weather.

SFA in FMCG

Many FMCG and pharmaceutical companies provide products which have a large market in A, B and C category cities as well as in rural India. The distribution channels are set up in terms of stockiest, dealers, retailers and, finally, consumers. It is essential for these companies to have control over the entire chain and therefore contact with sales persons at every level in the supply chain is essential. Due to this, many FMCG companies have a good sales force automation module which helps them to collect, collate, co-relate and analyse information from the market in real-time. I foresee a convergence between laptops and mobile phone applications.

Currently we do not have a formal sales force automation module. However, we are in the process of developing the same. Our approach has been to create infrastructure first and then demand information from the sales force. In this regard we provided more than 200 laptops to our sales force with VO data cards last year. Now that the infrastructure has been developed; we will be demanding information from the sales force in terms of the reports from the market; their activities through a Web-based portal.

Zoeb Adenwala, Chief, IT, Pidilite Industries

Pidilite has been using applications such as ERP, SCM and CRM for quite some time now. We are using ERP since 1997, and an in-house developed SCM along with Web-based applications. That ERP is the most common application across verticals is due to that fact that companies are faced with a problem of transaction volumes and size of data plus a need to integrate various applications. This is why investment in ERP and application servers is relatively higher than that in other business applications such as data-warehousing, CRM and SCM.

The reason for data warehousing and BI to have fewer adopters is because a DW/BI system needs clean and consistent data from various data sources. It takes an effort to clean-up the database, consolidate, and standardise it according to the system, which prevents many companies from treading this path.

That the FMCG sector has the highest no of users is not surprising. One is due to the retail boom and two they need such tools to beat competition by properly positioning their products within a given time frame.

SFA

With competition increasing, the need to automate the sales force is also increasing. Initially, we did try to provide PDAs to our sales team but somehow it was not accepted. Now we have developed a Web-based application wherein the sales force files reports through cyber cafes.

We have also developed an SMS system to exchange important information on a regular basis. We are also planning to invest in SCM as business volumes have increased and our in-house SCM system is not giving the desired results with expanding business.