Steel and SAP

 INDIA:

What are some major technology investments at your enterprise?

We had made investment of Rs.26 crore in SAP implementation largely hardware which included servers.  

Any overhauls of significant scale or value at your enterprise?

We moved from our home-grown legacy system to SAP across various organizational functions last July except the HR and Payrolls' funcions.

What's your strategy for the coming future?

We are planning to financial integration. So far we have implemented SAP in sort of island fashion where we have tried to integrate with some business units such as sales, order booking, finance. But we want to the SAP implementation across our business units in the organization. SAIL has 37 different business units, five integrated steel plants, other anxicllary unit along with a central marketing and sales unit. Many of these units are not spared across and are seperate but needs to be integrated.  

Advice to peers in terms of lessons, mistakes or challenges you experienced over past few years?

I think SAP is a must for businesses but needs lots of support from the top that is from the corporate level. In terms of lessons learnt, as we had implemented SAP in some business units and not across the units so integration is a time consuming process. So, I think we should have an IT vision for the organization before we started to implement SAP in some business units.

IT is as a competitive differentiator at your organization - How?

Since our central marketing and sales unit has deployed SAP, for the sales and marketing team still its a learning curve and is used largely as information provider and not as an enabler. But still we are on learning curve and there are many more benefits which we are yet to derive from IT.