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May be the buck does not start here but it stops here

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Preeti
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PUNE, INDIA: Processes should be mature. Users need to be ready. Complacence must be defenestrated. Overlaps should be avoided in heterogeneity. This is not self-flagellation. But a candid introspection where IT prefers to not pass the blame on to some one else.

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Shrikant Kulkarni, Senior VP and CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd., talks about a recent SAP implementation and in a parallel track, reveals the right posture to handle many IT paradoxes.

What is the latest page in your IT blueprint that you are excited about?

Lot of things are happening. We are, for instance, among the very few first companies in the industry to deploy a private cloud. We have moved all our applications to the Cloud. It is highly scalable with memory flexibility as well as computing power agility. We can add or move the resources as per needs.

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No overlaps or need to write off old incumbents?

No. The way we have planned it is very complimentary. Nothing needs to be stripped off.

Do you also navigate the typical IT paradox of cost containment vs. IT innovation as Martha Heller has identified in a book?

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What matters is your roadmap. Success of any ERP is as good as the user community experience. That decides a lot. I mean traits like progressive thinking vs. complacence. These factors are very important. KPIT Cummins is growing at a good pace for the last two years for instance. Now with all the growth and a lot of inorganic scale, the business model needs to rise up as well.

What next are you looking forward to?

We have decided to go for SuccessFactors as a tool. It offers many features that we need now to develop a lean organization. We are also working on CRM and on fine tuning it further. While we are expanding we have to see business dashboards are in place. We want to deploy some analytical tools from SAP too. In the next year, we will consider a lot of these new tools. But for that mature processes are an imperative. We need to work on that. Implementing things like Analytics directly is not practical. One needs to look inwards and be ready for it.

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But do all IT folks think that way? Incidentally, a Panorama Consulting study pointed how of the 29 per cent Enterprise projects running under delays, the top five per cent can be attributed to internal issues while four per cent to vendor functionality.

The important part is that two or three factors should be always borne in mind. User readiness- how much are they prepared for a change; customer knowledge-ability about the suite - how good are they in understanding it; or bandwidth- which is not that big issue if tackled properly. For instance, in our case, we ensured that we have the right team in place before diving in.

So did you take a big bang approach to it?

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We had a phased approach. We put HR, Finance etc under the ambit first before rewiring business. We had good internally developed systems before but they were not really integrated and they were not serving the purpose for current needs.

Why SAP? Does your being in the IT industry yourself change a lot of things?

Every player offers different functionalities. More or less, there is little difference when you compare different products. But the important part is about support or skills or bandwidth availability etc to make things happen. SAP has experience, credibility and their proven ERP was a good point. We have been using it across many other functional areas since 2009. We are not a usual ERP customer. We do specialized project planning and delivery. So this module becomes complex and with needs of report planning or resource planning etc, the requirements change. We have almost covered the spectrum today. It has been a smooth deployment so far.

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Any challenges?

Not many except may be the customization part or best practice areas where convincing our user community is not so easy. But functionalities like procurement or Budget control have been very effectively used. We have got recruitment area also in place now which is crucial as we are an IT organization ourselves.

Recently a lot of talk has surfaced about indirect access violations and data restrictions with respect to ERP usage. What's your understanding of the debate so far?

I will blame the IT function. They have to create the right situation and have to be careful. They should eliminate inconsistencies over a period of time. It depends on the combination of the software pieces being used. There will be some heterogeneity always and this is why one should take care when it comes to configurations or data inconsistencies. They can creep in and some overlaps happen naturally if not paid special attention to.

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