Dabur: With IT Chyawanprash

It's not only Colgate, but India's fourth-largest FMCG
company Dabur too joined the IT outsourcing bandwagon in 2004, when as part of a
10-year deal it signed up Accenture to manage and execute all its IT functions.
Dabur has been maintaining a long relationship with Accenture, dating back to
more than a decade-not only has it been outsourcing pieces of IT functions,
the association has also often involved business consulting. In fact, Accenture
advised Dabur on its purchase of US-based Abbott Laboratories last year.

No wonder then, Sanjay Jain, country MD, Accenture India calls
this contract a full-fledged IT-enabled business transformation outsourcing
deal. The IT setup that Dabur outsourced can be classified at three primary
levels: computers, networking, and applications. Besides, it also includes
additional consulting initiatives involving strategy and business architecture,
supply-chain management, and solutions engineering service lines.

Under hardware and networking, asset ownership has transferred
to Accenture while IT employees too have been absorbed into the Accenture
payroll. On the applications front, Accenture is designing, building, and
running IT systems like servers, desktops, network for the supply chain, and
secondary sales functions like helpdesks. Over the years, the FMCG major has
made substantial investments in the areas of ERP and SCM; Accenture has further
enhanced these technology resources by developing and running end-to-end
solutions.

Therefore, the key areas where Accenture has been delivering to
Dabur till now, involve not only IT functions and applications management, but
more importantly, design and delivery of key strategic systems such as
supply-chain management and secondary-sales systems. This outsourcing model has
enabled Dabur to focus on its core strengths, namely procurement, marketing, and
distribution of consumer products. Consequently, outside of Accenture's ambit,
Dabur has been able to finetune its e-procurement solution as well as improve
the efficiency and standard of services delivered; Ariba's e-procurement
solution has indeed helped Dabur make a killing. Anil Garg, DGM, IT, Dabur adds
that reduction in operational costs has been another major benefit to the
company.