JSW Steel implements Oracle E-business suite

Jindal South West (JSW) Steel Ltd has announced that it has gone live with several modules of Oracle E- Business Suite 11i.10, with an aim to enhance its production capacity and drive expansion plans throughout its businesses. The company is expanding its steel production capacity from 2.5 million to 4 million tons per annum with a planned investment of Rs 1275 crore.

JSW Steel implemented E-business modules including Oracle Purchasing, Oracle Inventory, Oracle Financials and Oracle project cost monitoring in its plant in Karnataka at an investment of Rs 3 crore. The company is planning to roll out these solutions in its two other plants in Maharashtra in the next 8-9 months. However, the company is keeping the legacy Steel Process Tracking System(STPS), in the manufacturing units and it will be integrated to the Oracle ERP.

IBM Business Consulting Services who was the implementation partner completed the project in 4 months and it went live in May 2005. JSW Steel has been using Oracle Financials solutions since 1998 and it has reduced the accounting book closing time by more than 10 percent, said the company director of finance Seshagiri Rao.” This significant return on investment prompted us to choose Oracle over other vendors”, he said.

The Oracle implementation is expected to enable the company to achieve integrate accounting, common business procurement practices, unified human resource management and effective project cost monitoring across its plant locations.

JSW Steel has implemented Oracle suite on Red Hat Linux on IBM eServer X 365 Xeon MP and IBM eServer X 445 Xeon MP. According to the company chief general manager (IT) K Vijayraghavan, “ We chose the Linux platform because it offers security, reliability, and performance at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).”