Maximum Business Impact : Mahindra & Mahindra : Project Harmony

Mahindra Group is a federation of 100+ companies where every group company
has the autonomy of decision making and  most of the companies have their own
sector specific ERP solutions deployed. This provided a huge opportunity of
achieving group level synergy and enabling deployment of best practices across
the group. You can envisage the benefits that the group could achieve from
having a group wide synergy among all the member companies.

The Concept

For that purpose, a Value Engineering study was conducted where key
executives across different companies of the group were interviewed and their
processes were benchmarked against the world's best. It was revealed through the
study that the group can leverage IT infrastructure across the group and bring
in synergy in common processes across all companies under the group. This was
the seed for conceptualization of 'Project Harmony'. Under this project, it was
proposed to have common IT infrastructure and common processes on a common IT
platform across the group. The project was also aimed to enable 'Single Version
of Truth' through integrated business analytics on common platform and by
ensuring central master data governance.

The Implementation

Towards this strategy, it was decided by the board group members that
business processes in the functions of HR, Finance-Accounts and Procurement were
to be harmonized across the group and would be implemented on single instance of
SAP for the whole Mahindra Group. Also, a Common Business Analytics strategy for
the group was also drafted prior to the actual implementation. For the
harmonization process, key executives from each of these departments coming from
various companies and verticals across the group, sat together and identified
common processes and came to consensus that would cater to all the companies and
would also be among the best practices in the industry.

In all 19 key processes from HR, 14 from Procurement and 11 key processes
from Finance were harmonized across the group and brought onto a single instance
of SAP. Due to the synergistic nature of the project, the approach was to create
a single comprehensive solution for similar requirements across the group. This
has resulted in the most significant change incorporated  in the IT architecture
landscape wherein all different instances of SAP previously running on
individual servers were consolidated into a single instance (ECC 6.0)
implemented on a single HARMONY instance.

The Results

This standard IT platform across the group has resulted in optimized
resource utilization and has improved inter-company processes. The common IT
infrastructure also lays the foundation to roll out shared services for Mahindra
Group. The common IT infrastructure and common processes will help in speedy
integration of new companies into the system which earlier involved process
synchronization of parent and the newly acquired companies, which was time
consuming also.

The project went live on April 1st, 2010. The project has resulted in
improved effectiveness due to reduction of administrative costs and also
improving employee productivity due to integrated analytics. This project
covered the entire Mahindra Group. The industries covered were Manufacturing
(Auto, Tractors, and Auto components), Financial Services, Retail, Real Estate
and Construction, Hospitality, Transport & Logistics, Defense, etc. Most
projects attempt go-live of only ERP for a few companies.

This project not only went live in 8 months, but also brought together 40+
companies on a single ERP instance; it also involved implementation of almost 20
horizontal and industry specific SAP solutions in a massive 'Big Bang' approach.