Though traditionally known as a strong player in the dry cell batteries and flash light segments, Eveready India has now diversified its business into packaged tea and mosquito coils. The company plans to achieve the same customer loyalty and recognition in other business segments as it has in its dry cell battery business till date. Eveready has around 10 manufacturing facilities located across the country. The company used to run independent silos of software within its IT infrastructure initially. It then decided to centralise all the IT processes and systems. The company has already deployed Oracle ebusiness Suite with Red Hat servers. Now, in order to meet the growing demands from the business and to increase employee productivity, the company has decided to go in for corporate planning and budgeting and sales force automation solutions. Eveready plans to integrate all three solutions into the centralised ERP system.

Decentralised Environment

There were many independent, stand-alone systems running at Eveready. The management was facing challenges with regard to consolidation of information and this was causing lots of delays in the planning process. The company was using Sybase and APT software for its manufacturing plant and Oracle database for sales and distribution. There was no real time availability of enterprise wide information. Arup Choudhury, senior general manager - IT, Eveready Industries, says, "In the expanding business environment, we were looking for an integrated solution, which would not only help us to improve the productivity of our employees but also to conduct business more smoothly and efficiently".

Eveready has around 300 sales persons, who are regularly on the field. A minute of delay in information transmission could mean a loss of lakhs of rupees for the company. In order to connect remotely located sales employees and centrally located employees, it was essential for the company to go for SFA software.

Eveready was also facing challenges in inventory management as the required information wasn’t available on time. The management had to wait for days to collect information across the enterprise. The IT people were facing problems while managing the growing data. In order to streamline the process and to reduce the working capital, the company decided to go in for an ERP solution, which would solve these problems along with providing real time access to information. To automate the functioning of its mobile sales people, the company has decided to go for sales force automation or SFA. Choudhury says, "In order to minimise the cost associated with sales support, we have decided to go in for an SFA solution, which will also help us to manage our workforce in the long run. Sometimes other departments also need to capitalise the information provided by the sales force. This will now be possible."

Change Management helps Deployment

TCS was the implementation partner in the ERP project. In order to transit from legacy-based software to the Oracle environment, Eveready HR department played a significant role. HR put in place a change management system for the entire organisation. Employees were given training in various modules. The implementation process was completed within 15 months. Eveready had taken 225 licences from Oracle. The total cost involved in the eBusiness Suite project was around Rs 5.5 crore. The Oracle eBusiness Suite was running on RedHat Advanced server and RedHat Cluster Suite. For demand forecasting, Demantra was selected and for corporate planning and budgeting, the company is evaluating Hyperion along with other solutions.

For the ERP deployment, Eveready had also evaluated SAP along with Oracle. The company decided to go in for open source tools. Choudhury says, "We decided to go in for Linux as the security provisions are high and Oracle was also promoting Linux. Average IT literacy in our company is high and therefore, we did not face any major problem during the deployment process. The whole process was reasonably smooth. After the deployment, as people started comparing the existing systems with the other options available in the market, then we realised we could keep improving. From time to time, we address various problems faced by our employees with the addition of new solutions to the existing one. We chose the Oracle solution as the pricing was right for us and it was relevant to our requirements."

Easy Flow of Information

All the manufacturing plants, warehouses and branch offices are now connected through various networks. The process of collecting and accessing information has been simplified. Starting from supply chain management to production and sales, all processes are now integrated into a single environment. This centralised environment of Eveready is further connected to the HDFC Bank payment gateway. Choudhury says, "The centralised environment has helped us to improve operations and move from being a people-dependent organisation to a process-dependent organisation. Now constant monitoring of the inventory is possible. The knowledge base of our employees has also expanded through departmental interactions."

In order to sustain itself in the competitive world, integration of demand forecasting and planning tools will help Eveready. The company has already put in place a clear-cut roadmap for Oracle as it is using various solutions from Oracle. The deployment has also facilitated wastage reduction by cutting down the inventory cost, which was possible through improved forecast accuracy by reviewing past business trends.