CIOIN

Pratap Gharge

VP and CIO, Bajaj Electricals

“We are the only company in the world to have implemented so many critical solutions together in one go.”

Executive summary

CIO 100 Winner: Bajaj Electricals were running a 12 year old legacy ERP solution that was due for upgradation. With Project 'Smile', not only did they get rid of legacy systems but also deployed several solutions in one go.

Mumbai-based Bajaj Electricals is a part of the reputed Bajaj Group. The consumer electrical products manufacturing company has 70 years of experience in the electrical market. With 30 branches, 600 distributors and 3,000 authorized dealers, the company was growing at a blistering pace but its legacy systems and processes were ill-equipped to support this business growth.

"Based on 12-year-old business processes, they (legacy systems) lacked advanced features like CRM and supply chain solutions. Managing the obsolete legacy system was also getting expensive and difficult for us," says Pratap Gharge, VP and CIO, Bajaj Electricals.

He knew that the 12-year-old legacy ERP solution was due for upgradation. But that wasn't it.

Business required improvement in back office operations along with timely and accurate MIS generation to be more responsive to market conditions. Streamlining pricing and discount schemes was deemed necessary for a good customer relationship and proper control over price delivery. "To rationalize cost and build operational efficiency it was necessary to optimize inventory, improve warehouse management and logistics," says Gharge.

He decided to embark on a transformation project for BPI with ICT (information and communication technologies), which meant that the project would bundle ERP, CRM, SCM and BI together.  It was conceived with the objective of simplifying business processes, migrating to new technology, innovate and integrate, learning orientation and to make the organization effective and efficient. The project was named SMILE.

But Gharge had to mitigate several challenges. Integrating all the software together was an issue. Internal change management was another thorny issue. "Getting people to adopt the changed processes was difficult. The change in mindset was difficult to bring about. Different applications were touching different set of teams and a lot of effort was required to make people adapt to the new set of processes," he says.

Once these issues were addressed, the project went live in April 2009. It has provided end-to-end connectivity across the organization and upgraded the company's IT infrastructure to meet business requirements.