CIOIN

T. K. Subramanian

divisional vice-president of United Spirits group

Executive summary

The acquisition of Shaw Wallace posed a new challenge to the T. K. Subramanian, divisional vice-president of United Spirits group. The IT integration a tricky exercise, but this would be a cultural integration. The challenges involved reining in a new set of users, 10 new manufacturing units and offices. The different IT structures at Shaw Wallace brought in process differences and integrating the two entities on SAP, would need all of the team's skills, and some more.

"There are processes at United Spirits that have been automated to such a degree that IT may not be very visible, but in the absence of IT, will become visible," Subramanian says. In March 2005, the structure would get a huge organizationwide fillip, throwing up a new challenge for Subramanian's team. The challenge stemmed from the group's Rs 1,300-crore acquisition of its closest domestic competitor, Shaw Wallace. For Subramanian's team, though, it was yesterday once more.

Two years prior to the Shaw Wallace acquisition, the IT organization of the UB Group's spirits division had put the finishing touches to its SAP implementation - the largest change management exercise in its history until then. In doing so, all the units of company - which encompassed 111 servers - were, for the first time, on one unified IT system.

Even in the midst of UB Group's own consolidation, Subramanian's immediate focus would be Shaw Wallace. For UB Group's IT team, however, it was also important to know the path of consolidation. Evidently, two choices arose before the UB management. First it could consolidate the UB companies, and then integrate the amalgamated entity with Shaw Wallace. This plan hinged on a court order recognizing the amalgamation. Or, UB could focus on integrating Shaw Wallace and let the internal amalgamation process follow. The management went with the second option.

By October 2005, his team and a managing committee had debated options before deciding to forego the Shaw Wallace home-bred IT system and, instead, bring it onto the UB Group's SAP platform - as opposed to merely consolidating two diverse systems using a third IT system. The immediate course of action was to address the diametrically opposite organizational structures of both entities. This called for, first, identifying the business processes at Shaw Wallace.

In November,he organized a workshop-meeting of the process owners at Shaw Wallace. The IT team followed this up by discussing common areas in the two entities, and how the transition to UB's systems could be brought into effect. After the workshop, the IT organization defined common business processes across the two entities.

The IT organization began the Shaw Wallace-integration initiative by drawing from the lessons of its in-house experience while implementing SAP. One of the obvious findings from their analysis was the centralized structure in the Shaw Wallace expanse. Getting the opening balance, by itself, was a challenge," explains Subramanian. "The kind of operational problems we faced at the start was tremendous," points out Subramanian. "From general ledger code, supplier code...everything had to be streamlined.

The change management initiative at Shaw Wallace left Subramanian with a sense of déjà vu - for good reason. To quantify usage in the new environment, the IT organization first divided users in two categories: operational users and information users. The IT organization identified them and created a more user-friendly source of the same data: an intranet portal. With the integration, Subramanian's team had created a common view of the two organizations, as every Shaw Wallace unit and its users became part of the regional proft center (RPC) in their geographic location. Shaw Wallace's IT folk too joined the IT team in their RPC. Shortly after integrating Shaw Wallace in the UB fold, the IT organization came full circle as the court orders on the internal amalgamation came through.