SIP Academy India Pvt Ltd is a children skill development organization headquartered in Chennai. Dinesh Victor, managing director of SIP, in a conversation with V. Sudhakshina of CIOL, tells why the institution invested in ERP solutions and how it benefited SIP.

What are the driving factors for investing in RAMCO applications?

Our businesses was hampered by the factors like - lower quality of data integrity, longer time taken for data capture and resultant analysis ultimately resulting into delayed business decisions. Moreover, our understanding of the complexity in line with the growth of the organization resulted in opting for an ERP solution.

Though ERP could solve problems and bring more efficiency into the work culture, a company of our size cannot possibly afford to invest in the big enterprise solutions. All other ERP solutions which we came across, such as Microsoft and Oracle solutions, had high capital cost.
We therefore opted Ramco ERP due to low capital cost. Besides the minimal capital expenditure, there were other added benefits associated with rented ERP like easy and fast implementation and no maintenance cost.

For SIP Academy, ERP has proved a great enabler and has supported it in all aspects. It is due to ERP that the company is able to maintain communications across all its 200 centers at different cities in India. To cope with the business challenges that normally arise while in the market, SIP put in place tools that helped improved productivity.

Do you think that legacy applications could not scale when your business grew or when you expanded your operations?

With legacy application, sales data never tallied between corporate and regional centers. Receivables and inventory data were very difficult to be reconciled prior to adopting ERP , which are effectively managed.
ERP improves productivity and it helps in streamlining processes and removes duplication of work. Data integration across the organization, more effective cost management and improvement in skill and competency level of the work force are few of the immediate and direct benefits from current ERP which was missing to a great extent in legacy applications.

What are the benefits you have seen from the deployment?

The ERP solution has been playing a critical role in our business. We have been able to address several organizational issues in a very short span of time. Above all, it removed our worries about owning a solution and maintaining it. We just pay for what we use. Ramco OnDemand ERP has proved especially successful since it has been customized to the company’s requirements.

What is your take on on-demand ERP/CRM application commonly referred to as SaaS applications v/s the traditional applications?

Recent research estimates that the annual cost to own and manage traditional "on-premise" software applications can be up to four times the initial purchase price. This is due to a company's need to acquire and maintain the resources needed to support a large scale in-house software deployment, including: hardware, software upgrades and maintenance, user education, and technical support.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) eliminates many of these costs - by taking responsibility for the day-to-day operations, upgrades, and infrastructure - rather than placing it on the end user. The result is a much more economical solution that allows a company to devote precious resources to its core activities that impact their top and bottom line.

SaaS model also offers just the "right" functionality because 80 per cent of people don't need the 80 per cent of the functionality in software. In on-premise model there is an incentive to buy more licenses than required due to discounts offered on higher user slabs. Thus an organization ends up buying more users than what is required in the short/mid term.

With SaaS, there is less of an incentive to buy more than you need, thus saving precious funds. Thirdly, the provider knows how much you are using on a real-time basis. Although the charging is immediate, there is no exposure to lengthy and often painful on-premise audits, which the on-premise vendors rely on to check compliance.