Buhler India : An ERP Upgrade, & ROI in Less Than a Year

Buhler India claims that its older ERP deployment is a 'dead horse' as it was

implemented at the stage where it was to support the basic requirement of the

business. This included piece-meal deployments — especially software — that were

different across different platforms, for different business units and

departments. Obviously, this led to independent functioning and the applications

of one department not 'talking' to each other. As business grew, Buhler needed a

system that would completely integrate the system from a system oriented

approach, ensuring realignment of roles according to the global processes and

compliances, highly secured and centralized data, and data transparency with

quick and effective report generation. Buhler claims to have started to realize

the ROI within the first year itself.

Buhler claims that the deployment was carried out with least downtime, and

was carried out completely internally. The total deployment cost was 1.12 crores,

with an expected ROI of 2.5 years and a productive life in excess of 10 years.

In short, the company has started seeing the benefits of the deployment which

was conceptualized to accommodate the local Indian requirement and sync it up to

the global template. At the same time, the global template is not be disturbed

and ensure the business process is in line with the global process within

Buhler, and among its associates. The final deployment was a combination of Dell

servers, workstations and PCs with Windows-based operating environments. The

bottomline though, is the rare occurrence in corporate deployments like these,

where the ROI was planned for 2.5 years, and met within one year.