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Nuts and Bolts: IT voltage and other sparks at MahaTransco

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Abhigna
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NEW DELHI, INDIA: For him it has been more than just an enterprise application deployment, and while he has a good grip on requirements and transition phases, he shares his view of the new poles of impact ahead.

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Sanjay Shinde, Chief Engineer (HRD) from Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Co Ltd talks about some undercurrents of IT at work

How easy is it to deploy and end-to-end ERP and how does it contrast to the legacy set-up before?

Before we put in SAP, all processes were functioning differently in multiple locations and so it has helped to put processes in all departments and it is a good consequence that now all end users are streamlined without too much process disruption.

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Has the transition been easy?

For a government organization, change management is a different piece altogether. We tried 14 sessions for 28 days all over the State for all end users and that made the shift easy. Most issues are only psychological so one has to embrace resistance as a natural force. We were prepared for it and guided adoption accordingly.

How crucial is the user requirement aspect when it comes to ensuring there are no unplanned surprises?

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Initially when we adopted the changes there was some confusion but with adequate training brought into effect, we sorted that out.

Has it helped in any differentiation among your peers?

We are the second major transmission company in India and we are proud to see that the number one company is now adopting a system while we are already in the fourth year with that. Due to this implementation there is not much need for any ISO stamp also because good process mapping has helped us a lot. A lot of areas are now already audited in the system.

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What has been the ‘moment of truth' so far?

At first we started by implementing finance and accounting processes. We made it mandatory for all vendors to bill as per the system and did not allow any circumventing. At the top level also we convinced Ministry that we would deliver better with a new-age scenario.

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So where to next?

We would be implementing SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) across 800 processes and we will also look at HANA for managing load requirements-based electricity dispatch etc.

How do you plan to leverage HANA?

We plan to put in HANA by end of March 2015. Data would be gathered from three locations and needs to be put on a single platform. We are excited about it as it will help a lot in the parts where operator needs exact requirement status for easier decision-making as well as for an analytical view of huge data that we have.