Back From The Brink

Torrent Power spent millions on an ERP project that seemed to be going nowhere. Here’s how they got it back on track.

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Soft Landing

This structure helped Torrent break up the implementation into phases. This started with an evaluation phase to provide a business and technical foundation to the ERP system.

A preparation phase defined the scope of the project, and the blueprint phase described the business process requirements of the company.

This was followed by a realization phase that helped conceptualize the business process requirements of the company, a preparation phase that included user training, and finally, a go-live phase would see the transition from the old system to the new.

The turnaround took a mere four months. "The project was taken over by the IT department in December 2000 and went live in April 2001," says Bandopadhyay with pride.

The recovery, however, did not cover all of the original modules. Bandopadhyay says that initially, the consultant had planned the ERP with six modules: purchase order, inventory, accounts payable, general ledger, fixed assets, and job cost. The finance modules including general ledger, accounts payable and fixed assets were discontinued.

"The integration of purchase with accounts payable and general ledger was creating a lot of illogical variance entries," Bandopadhyay says. "These were not acceptable to the accounts department. Reporting was also a major issue with the accounts department, and the financial modules were discontinued."

The success of the project also outweighed other IT priorities. While Bandopadhyay would have preferred zero customization, he was forced to do some tinkering for the purchase module. This was required because the ERP module did not have any provision for taxes and other charges like excise, freight, loading and unloading charges, which are required by Indian regulations. It was painful, but a compromise was made.

Despite this, Bandopadhyay is pleased with the way things have panned out. "When the in-house IT team took charge of the implementation after discontinuing the consultant, they proved themselves by rolling out the implementation in a very short period," he says, his eye clearly on the big picture.

He adds that the organization also benefited from the ERP and "the users' demand for qualitative reports increased to a great extent," he says.

In the end, the project not only made an about-turn, it also marched ahead and raised the bar. And that's hard to top.