Other Finalists : Bajaj Electricals : Project SMILE

Bajaj Electricals, a known name in consumer electronics for almost 65 years,

was confined to legacy systems for most of their business processes. This was

causing hindrance to core business operations, as growth was fast but the legacy

systems weren't able to support it. At places, these systems were more than 12

years old and it was becoming costly and difficult to maintain them. Even the

supporting technology platforms had become outdated. Hence it was decided by the

management to initiate a project that will focus towards improving business

processes with IT systems. They decided to implement ERP, SCM, CRM & BI

applications together with complete integration taking a big-bang approach. The

Oracle Business suite of applications was selected for implementation, and the

project was named 'Project SMILE.' This is an acronym for the objectives to be

achieved: S — Simplify the business processes, M — Migration to newer

technologies, I — Innovative and Integrated Business applications, L — Create

learning orientation across the organization, E — to make entire organization

Effective & Efficient.

Before implementation of this project, inefficient processes resulted in

revenue loss as there were no forecasting or planning tools available. Plus,

legacy systems were not built to support current business processes. These

challenges were overcome by implementation of the following products: Oracle

E-business Applications (ERP), Oracle Siebel CRM Applications, Oracle Demantra

Demand Management Tool for demand forecasting, and on top of these apps,

business intelligence solutions like Oracle Daily Business Intelligence and

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for Sales Analytics, Dashboards

& Reporting (OBI) were also implemented.

Post deployment, the company has been able to get the investment payback

achieved within the first year, and just from the savings coming out from one

module called Siebel Dynamic Pricing Module. The company can now make right

items available at the right time with Advanced Supply Chain Planning solution,

which has reduced the overall inventory in the pipeline and also improve the

company's ability to service customer orders. The overall inventory losses have

been brought down by 2% due to this.

This is a unique project, where ERP, CRM and SCM suite of applications were

not just implemented in a big bang approach and rolled out across 26 locations,

and six business units, but also integrated together for streamlining and

automating the end to end business processes of the company.