Be bold in selecting an IT solution. Do not go by the vendor's
tall claims on what the solution will do; rather, ask whether that solution
meets your requirements and is in sync with your company's business
objectives" said NC Raghu Ram, vice president, IT, Orchid Pharmaceuticals.
As the IT head of a dynamic and young company like Orchid, Raghu Ram is one of
the new age CIOs-vocal, daring and forthright. CIO's like him play a key
role in seamlessly integrating IT and enabling organizational change on a grand
scale. In the case of Orchid, Raghu Ram has engineered enterprise-wide
transformation by implementing all the modules of SAP across locations of Orchid
in just about six months. No wonder then that Orchid's SAP implementation is
one of SAP's global references. A testimony to that end comes from Martin
Selchert of the University of Applied Science, Germany, who in his book Case
Studies on SAP Best Practices termed the SAP implementation at Orchid as one of
the best in the world.
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Orchid, started in 1992, is also one of the youngest
pharmaceuticals companies in India to procure the ISO 9001:2000 certifications
and it is one    of the biggest producers and exporters of
Cephalosporin in India. Its decision to implement ERP in 2001 was a major one -
besides being an index of its committment to IT - for this Chennai-based Rs 713
crore pharmaceuticals company that exports its products to 75 countries. Before
the ERP implementation, the company was running an in-house enterprise-wide
solution, but in time, as Orchid grew, the solution was not able to scale up to
the distributed environment, and hence all the locations were functioning in
isolation.
Raghu Ram, a veteran ERP professional, took the road less
traveled and cruised the technology landscape with elan. The emphasis all the
while was "What we want" and not "What the vendor has". Says
the CIO, "The level-headed approach is vital. For, even a small, unknown
product might address all the requirements better than a big generic brand. In
the decision-making process one has to factor in all the key requirements and
expectations of the enterprise and a CIO should align the solution with the IT
roadmap and the company's business objectives." Raghu Ram adds that,
"With our priorities set from day one, the ERP selection and implementation
at Orchid has indeed been a rewarding and an enjoyable experience."
Shrikanth
G in Chennai
Managing IT at Orchid
The Early Days
When Raghu Ram joined the company in 2001, the mandate before him was to
implement an ERP solution. According to him the key goal of any IT deployment is
to substantially increase operational efficiency, and that called for aggressive
use of information systems. Since the emphasis was on quality, the management
supported his decision that the selection of an ERP solution would not be based
on popular perception but instead, on its merits. In the ensuing days, the IT
team at Orchid scanned 30 ERP solutions and shortlisted five — Oracle, Baan,
JD Edwards, Ramco eApplications and SAP. Each vendor's solution was thoroughly
studied and a consensus was reached on implementing SAP, which met 96% of the
company's requirements.
The Big Bang Approach
Orchid is probably one of the very few companies in India to have
implemented all the modules of SAP in one go cutting across 17 of its locations.
The implementation work started in October 2001 and by April 2002, the company
went live with its ERP solution, a record of sorts that defied popular myths
that ERP implementations need at least 18 months to implement. The ERP
encompassed the company's own locations and two factories in Alathur in Tamil
Nadu, its R&D facility and the Aurangabad plant. Also, the company did not
follow the traditional ASAP model for implementation prescribed by SAP; rather
it took some of the methodologies from the ASAP model and juxtaposed these with
its own implementation methods devised by Raghu Ram. Here is where the technical
excellence of the CIO and his ability to forge a very unique IT implementation
methodology come to the fore. The Orchid CIO, since the beginning of his IT
career, has been an ERP implementer and that is one of the keys to the SAP
success at Orchid.
When the solution went live in April 2002, there were already
290 users fully trained in using the ERP solution. Yet another unique thing
about the whole ERP implementation at Orchid was the involvement of people from
various functions in the implementation. For instance the top two from each
department of the company were transferred to the MIS team and hence every
module got the benefit of their viewpoints. Orchid also did five rounds of
testing as against the one SAP recommended to ensure failsafe deployement.
IT: the manufacturing back end
Orchid is a composite pharmaceutical company. It has R&D, bulk drugs and
formulations manufacturing. IT is used at varying levels at Orchid, right from
the procurement of raw materials to controlling the quality parameters. Post the
ERP implementation Orchid has seen certain defined improvements and benefits.
For one, the 24/7 availability of data across locations has set the stage for
larger benefits. For instance, the engineering items inventory has come down,
the inventory turnover has improved, and the receivable items have come down.
One of the most significant benefits was that response time in reaching the
customers improved several-fold. Raghu Ram says he expects more in the days
ahead as several new initiatives are on as part of the company's overall IT
roadmap the holy grail of which is the Knowledge Management initiative. Also
planned are an Enterprise Performance Management initiative to optimally manage
man, machine, materials, and money and create a synergy between business
objectives and individual performance, and a Manufacturing Execution System (MES)
that will help Orchid control processes and contain wastage and help in optimal
use of manufacturing systems, and which is also in consonance with good
manufacturing practices. As Raghu Ram says, "By 2007 Orchid will be fully
integrated, from the machine to the boardroom."
Achievements
In a career spanning over two decades, NC Raghu Ram has seen
ERP evolve from its lesser known elder—MRP. His tryst with ERP began in 1996
at Kirloskar Toyoda Textile Machinery Limited. Here he implemented an integrated
ERP solution that took care of a gamut of functions. The solution called
Advanced Manufacturing Resources Utilization (AMRUT), a unique implementation in
the textile space in its time, could forecast in a dynamic fashion the
composition and strengths required for components like ring spinning frames,
enabling, thus, in arriving at the right configuration of the frames.
Three years later, Raghu Ram performed yet another major ERP
job at the Bharat Earth Movers Limited (BEML), where he implemented the first
ever ERP adoption in the public sector. The solution was Ramco's eApplications.
Meanwhile, the biggest feather in his ERP cap is the SAP rollout at Orchid that
brought to fore his unique talents in the realm of implementing ERP and making
it a roaring success.