Nuts and Bolts: On-demand is not for us

MUMBAI, INDIA: A customer's peek into gaps, customisation, usability and more.

How strong is IT for your company?

Ours is a UK-based MNC with about 21 units in India. There’s not very much from an IT perspective apart from the usual Tally etc, but when I joined I explored a suitable package for the company. SAP was found to be good and we used it with IBM as the implementation partner.

What is the biggest implementation pothole as you see it?

Major challenge as I would put is data acquisition, specially when it is about acquiring master data.

Is customization a big need, or a big gap?

There are some pain areas that make customizing an important process. Vendors have heaps of customizing capabilities and product-related reports will take care of this area, I believe.

How adequate is usability?

SAP is good that way, it is a user-friendly product. It is very important for us because users are little adamant on that area, specially from the production floor side. Better reporting tools for management are vital too.

How ready are you now to hop onto the on-demand stage? Or not?

The concept is good, but not suitable. Ours is all about manufacturing, when it comes to industry flavour. In case of on-demand the choice if very less that way, and so is the scope for customization. So we are not thinking about it. For a single plant, may be on-demand would be a good option.

What next then?

The Budget in our organisation is need-based. I have a three-year roadmap as of now. The first year walks into SAP implementation in October. The second would be domain consolidation for data security etc and the third one would be complete GRC, HTML frameworks.