Atul boosts efficiency with ‘mobSales’ ERP on Mobile Devices

Gujarat-based Atul Ltd, member of Lalbhai Group is one of the oldest business houses of India, with interests mainly in textiles and chemicals. Incepted in 1947, Atul has a turnover in excess of Rs 2307 crores (FY 2013-14) and is one of Asia’s largest integrated chemical manufacturing complexes which is spread over 1400 acres of land.

The company procures more than 28000 materials from over 8700 Vendors every year to produce and sell 4000 assorted product SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) across its 7 business verticals at 3 manufacturing locations.  Atul caters to about 5600 customers which are serviced by 33 Stock Depots in India and through 5 foreign subsidiaries globally. Availability of seamless information at all stages of business became a mandate at Atul decision making as well as attaining functional and operational efficiency.

The Challenges

Despite having the complete conventional ERP and MIS reporting in place along with BI dashboards, the business agility of Atul needed an impetus through provision of sales order information and sales booking to take the organization to the next level of efficiency.

The prevailing ERP definitely provided the means of carrying out transactions seamlessly through its modular functions, but still is had a scope of improvement with factors that could significantly enhance the business efficiency like— update of outstanding / overdue payments from customers while interacting with the customer. This information was available at the back-office or on the laptop client available with the Sales Managers. But, the company needed to connect & derive the same. A mobile solution was the need of the hour as it would be more handy & flexible.

The Implementation

Atul IT realized that the ERP application on mobile devices can enhance business capabilities and insights. After massive R&D on how to achieve desired IT infrastructure, the IT team’s approach for integrating a mobile Application along with their back-end Oracle EBS system, began with acquiring a cloud Server with open-source components. Once the Cloud server was set and functioning, the IT team developed and published the cross-platform mobile application on all platforms including Windows, iOS and Android.

Rajat Sharma

President – IT, Atul Ltd & Director, Atul Infotech

The Results

Due to the deployments, the company managed to save Rs 16.20 crore on TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) with delivery of equivalent Data Warehouse solution & functional efficiency as that of ‘Oracle BI Enterprise Edition’ implementation. Instantaneous ‘Sales Order Booking’ happened as a result, instead of a time lag of a business day.