MRF chooses SAP for automotive solutions

BANGALORE: SAP India has announced that MRF Limited, India's leading tyre manufacturing company, has selected SAP for automotive solutions to support efforts to drive operational excellence across its global organization.

Following a detailed evaluation process, MRF opted to replace existing applications from Oracle in favour of SAP's leading SAP ERP and SAP CRM solutions, based on the SAP NetWeaver platform.

With global operations manufacturing and distributing tyres to more than 75 countries, MRF was faced with the need to improve visibility across its entire value chain from raw materials to finished-goods partners in order to plan better and adapt to fluctuations in global supply and demand.

With SAP, the tyre company will be able to seamlessly integrate data between logistics and finance, eliminating redundant work and saving time and operational costs. With this, all major tyre companies in India run SAP solutions.

MRF has selected Siemens Information Systems (SIS) as the partner for implementation, HP Integrity servers and IBM DB2 as the database, on which this SAP deployment will happen.

"At MRF, we selected SAP after a detailed evaluation process," said Prince Azariah, CIO, MRF Ltd.

"SAP came out on top in terms of product superiority, post sales support, record customer satisfaction and we are confident that taking advantage of SAP's enterprise SOA product roadmap would be a strategic decision supporting our plans for continued growth," he added.

MRF will implement SAP solutions at its six global manufacturing plants and 100 sales offices including the company headquarters in Bangalore. The implementation is currently underway with a go-live expected in the fourth quarter of 2007. MRF will also establish an automotive user group within the company in its efforts to better user reception and ensure better ROI, Azariah said.

Guenter Lasser, director, Automotive Business Unit, SAP, said: "SAP is proud to be chosen as the catalyst for MRF's transformation journey. With SAP for Automotive solutions and SAP NetWeaver as the platform for collaboration, SAP will provide MRF the best-suited solutions to enable innovation, deliver better value at lower costs with a broad range of best practices in the industry."

With this deal, MRF joins a growing number of Indian enterprises who have replaced their existing solutions with SAP.

CIOL Bureau