Advertisment

Champion Integrator

author-image
DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

Advertisment

Personal

Diary

Current

role:
VP—IT, Orchid Pharmaceuticals: Raghu Ram joined Orchid

in 2001 as GM-IT and in a short span of time has been elevated to

the post of VP.



Past roles: Started his career in 1984 with Bharat
Electronics Limited (BEL) as deputy engineer and left the company in

1994 as deputy manager. He joined BPL Refrigeration in 1994 as

manager for planning and IT. In 1996, he joined Kirloskar Toyoda as

member, production planning, and systems and left them in 1999 as

head of systems and joined as project manger in Ramco Systems.



Education: B.E (Mechanical) from BMS College, Bangalore.


Family: Wife, Rukmani, currently pursuing a PhD in Literature
in Madras University; two sons, Abhijit and Arjun.


NC

Raghu Ram, VP—IT, Orchid Pharmaceuticals

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."

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment

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."

Advertisment

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.

Advertisment