Scalable, flexible IT important for Indian SMB: SAP

BANGALORE, INDIA: Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) wanting to grow their business and increase market share and profitability must first achieve scalability and transparency – this was the theme of SAP Talk Show - SME Legend 2010 hosted here, today.

SAP brought together some of its most innovative Indian SME customers to showcase how SAP solutions are being used to achieve demonstrable business benefits. The talk show, hosted by Debdeep Sengupta, vice president SME and Channels, SAP India, included discussions on why an end-to-end view of operations is critical to enabling greater transparency and accountability, and creating lean and customer-centric organizations.

The panel included Luis Murguia, senior vice president of SME, SAP EMEA and India, along with esteemed SAP customers - Manipal Universal Learning, Greaves Cotton Limited and Prognosys eServices Pvt. Ltd.

Murguia said, “ SMEs have several advantages over their larger counterparts, including the ability to react faster and with greater focus to market trends and customer needs.”

“Because of this, many have the opportunity to outpace the competition and seize market share. However, this presents its own challenges, as sustained growth requires a technology infrastructure that can scale, manage increasing data complexity while maintaining operational excellence and efficiency,” he added.

Manipal Education and Greaves Cotton Limited participated in the talk show to share their views on the importance of using IT solutions which are scalable and flexible enough to keep pace with developments in the business and deliver rapid time to value.

Manipal Education's vision is to be a global leader and achieve excellence in higher education. They have implemented SAP ERP ECC 6.0 to drive operational excellence and build a robust, student-centric organisation with a multi-country footprint, said a press release. 

Greaves Cotton Limited has worked with SAP for over two years; running SAP across various areas of their business including Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing and Order Management, Materials Management and Manufacturing, Maintenance, Quality Management and Business Intelligence. This has resulted in significant benefits in optimized inventory, employee and payroll management and financial closure time cycle, added the release.

“As businesses grow it can be more difficult to maintain agility and responsiveness, which is why SMEs who want to become globally competitive need solutions which provide end-to-end transparency and allow them to turn insight into meaningful action, “ said Deb Deep Sengupta.

He further added that having real-time visibility into every operational area and being able to respond instantaneously is crucial to identifying and capturing business opportunities.