Poultry farm set to adopt ERP

BANGALORE: Coimbatore-based Suguna Poultry Farm Ltd has chosen IBM to implement an Oracle E-Business suite to further its business. As part of the Rs 8-crore deal, Oracle's application will work on IBM Power5 servers, which boast partitioning and virtualisation features.

At a press conference in Bangalore today, Ramesh Srinivas, partner, Business Consulting Services, IBM India, termed the understanding "only the beginning of a partnership to ensure that Suguna Poultry's growth plans come to fruition".

The venture was the first of its kind on the Indian poultry farming scene, claimed Srinivas, and identified the integration of a "complex supply chain" as the prime challenge, besides regular tasks such as consulting, implementing, financials, etc.

Suguna Poultry has its corporate office at Coimbatore besides seven regional offices and 74 branch offices. The implementation, which goes live in June 2006, will also span six poultry farms that focus on the UK-imported original stock, 126 breeder farms, 35 hatcheries, 10,000 broiler farms, 30 feed mills and five transportation offices.

Speaking on the occasion, Subhomoy Sengupta, director-sales,Oracle India, said that, since poultry was a relatively new area of enterprise resource planning (ERP) adoption, products intended for different functionality had been adopted to drive lot management, stock management, material traceability and transportation of feed, stocks and medicines among other things.

“We were able to factor in a 'growing charges computation' based on such criterion as livability/mortality and standard charges, etc,” he said.

Suguna's managing director B Soundararajan said that the process spread offered by the new solution included ERP, supply chain management (SCM), supplier relationship management (SRM) and customer relationship management (CRM). The per capita consumption of chicken was still way off the global average in India, he observed, and spoke of improving marketshare to 20 percent by 2010.

Suguna's meat products are marketed under the brand names Sugie's and Tanya. The company reported turnover in excess of Rs 813 crore during 2004-05 and, in the first half of 2005-06, has already registered sales of Rs 508 crore. The firm is looking to train nearly 3,000 employees before transition to the new ERP.