Absolute Transformation @ Shalimar Paints

Founded in 1902 by two British entrepreneurs AN Turner and AC Wright, Shalimar Paints, with a legacy of 112 years, is India's oldest paints and manufacturing company. For over 112 years, Shalimar Paints has manufactured quality paints and delivered quality finishes. During its journey, the company went through a lot of changes and witnessed a range of product portfolio that strengthened its reach in the Indian market. Today it is present in the market with paints, industrial coatings, aviation coatings, marine paints and coatings for metal decoration, and food can lacquers.

ENDEAVORING TO TRANSFORM

Though it has been a traditional paints company, it is now evolving to become more relevant to the consumers of today as it has a brand legacy that dates more than a century year and it is using that to leverage brand as well as tell the story-one that is of transformation. It began to don a new image through brand transformation. But doing just a decorative work on the logo and releasing ad campaign with mere new ideas was not sufficient. It tried to introduce a new culture and rest faith in the ‘Science and Arts of Paints'. Its objective with this is to become one of the leading paint manufacturing companies in the country, a leader in product innovation and customer satisfaction. The things it is doing differently to bring about this brand resurgence is through identity change with new logo and packaging, be customer-centric through dedicated projects in sales & marketing, define and launch a new product portfolio living up to our commitment to manufacture excellence and finall and strengthen its channel engagement and value its longstanding relationship.

But technology is a huge contributor to the change the company envisioned. It involves using state-of-the-art IT and computing systems.

ATTEMPT TO TRANSFORM

Taking note of the old legacy systems at the company, the management decided to add glitter to its IT infrastructure so that it could enhance efficiency through processes. The company invested heavily on upgrading systems, software and data center. But it wasn't easy, since finding a right partner to deploy solutions that help the company compete successfully in the market was again a significant task.

Transformation of operations was a daunting task. For Shalimar Paints, as recounts the spokesperson, the foremost step was to do an end to end assessment of the existing IT system and infrastructure and then analyze the scope of improvement. Further, the company conducted a "Value Engineering Workshop" with the leadership team to know and understand their requirements, vision, mission and milestones that they associate with Shalimar Paints. It helped the company evaluate the challenges that stared in the face.

"This immensely helped us in understanding and that has helped us create a report of improvement. The priority of the IT team is now in sync to the objectives of the business and the way forward for us is to pick up high impact action items and work around it," says Ashok Jade, IT Head, Shalimar Paints.

IT is now being used effectively and innovatively by Shalimar to add on to this new brand image. But it was not a cakewalk for the company to revitalize its operations. A lot of toil went into transforming the company and deploying the new tools to boost processes and enhance efficiency.

He further divulges that the company zeroed in on SAP upgrade, data center upgrade, BI project is in progress and to add to that, we majorly targeted up gradation for end user infrastructure. The other high impact actions items in our agenda include HRMS and planning and forecasting development that is right now work in progress."

The company is now trying to focus and excel in each and every step for consistent improvement. "This is what the IT team is trying to implement and practice where it is undertaking minor improvements, checks and controls and yielding effective results," reveals Jade.

THE CHALLENGES EARLIER FACED BY SHALIMAR IN TERMS OF IT

Shalimar has high profitable growth vision. IT System in Shalimar was required to be renovated mainly on three fronts:

• Infrastructure revamp
• Process and functionality enrichment
• New systems & integration

The IT team started working simultaneously on all three fronts and has been able to achieve success in this endeavor to a large extent but we at Shalimar, understand that this is a continuous process and we are trying to maintain the momentum.

"We deployed expert agencies and skilled IT teams to speed up the activities and this newly induced team has shown good result in the last couple of months," adds Jade.

CHANGES AND BENEFITS

If the company is to be believed, the end to end assessment of the IT system shows the improvement that has been achieved for India's oldest paints company. Business has benefited on different fronts including:

• Right sized infrastructure has helped to increase employee efficiency
• Various checks and controls and end to end process integration had provided benefits like secure and timely payment to vendors, reduced the gap between demand and supply so on
• Visibility on efficiency of dealer/distribution network which helped to layout right biz strategy
• Utilization of the discount and rebate schemes of SAP
• Reporting and BI have given Information visibility and accuracy for correct decision-making

AT PAR WITH INDUSTRY TRENDS

Cloud or analytic solutions are best bets these days for any industry, in an evolving IT landscape. So it applies to Shalimar as well, which is undergoing a total business transformation. "Using advanced innovations and technologies was always part of our IT strategy which we laid down. We have already started leveraging these technologies to bring a new boost to the brand identity. Our Managing Director, Sameer Nagpal is an IT enthusiast and therefore using various new technologies for business innovation is an obvious trend and undoubtedly, in future also we will keep evaluating and leveraging various new technologies," concludes Jade.