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.