Part of the Rs. 20,000 crore Bajaj Group, Bajaj Electricals specializes in consumer electrical products and lighting solutions. The firm has 19 branch offices, 600 distributors, 3,000 authorized dealers, more than 2.5 lakh retail outlets and over 230 service franchises spread across the country.

While business was growing fast for Bajaj Electricals, it realized that its legacy systems and processes were unable to support business growth. Legacy systems were more than 12 years old and were very costly and difficult to maintain. These legacy systems were based on 12-year old business processes, which lacked the required business controls for an already-grown business.

Rollout of project ‘SMILE’

To address these issues, the corporate management council decided to launch a project to focus on improving business processes and also deploy IT systems to support these new processes. Leading management consultants were engaged to study all the business processes and IT application architecture and recommend necessary improvements.

This project was named ‘Project SMILE’ and a suite of Oracle Ready application products offering best-of-breed functionalities was selected for the implementation. These included ERP, CRM, SCM and BI. This was a very complex implementation from a technical as well as business perspective. Integration was the key challenge for the project to be successful and to make the integrated applications work in a seamless manner. The sales cycle of Pre-sales and Order to Cash flows from Siebel impacted several departments. The supply chain solution (ASCP) depend on the demand estimated by the Sales team in Oracle Demantra.

Implementation Benefits

The project was completed in less than a year and got stabilized within the first two months. The firm went live in just 363 days in a major way at all its branches, godowns, factories, business units. Bajaj Electricals believes it is probably the first company in the world to have implemented best-of-breed CRM, SCM, ERP and BI with complete integration at one time, simultaneously.

"The firm has achieved two percent reduction in inventory leakages and savings of Rs 2 crore per annum. Profitability has jumped from 20 to 31 percent” - Pratap Gharge, VP and CIO, Bajaj Electricals

The implementation of the Siebel Dynamic Pricing Module has given the company’s consumer durable appliances business units the ability to define complex discounts schemes and deliver it consistently to pre-defined market areas. With a dynamic tool available, the firm was able to control its discounts delivery in a flexible yet controlled manner across India. This has resulted in savings at 0.5 percent extra discount which amounts to savings of Rs 11.5 crore on the turnover of Rs 2,300 crore in 2009 - 2010. Additionally, profitability has jumped from 20 to 31 percent post implementation.

The Oracle ERP solution has streamlined order execution, inventory management process and procurement. Better inventory management practices have brought in accountability into inventory shortages with the firm’s C&F agents. The firm is now able to recover shortages from the C&F agents and reduce thefts and leakages in inventory.

With an inventory holding of Rs 100 crore (year end), Bajaj Electricals has achieved a 2 percent reduction in leakage and saved Rs 2 crore per annum.

Bajaj Electricals is a Silver EDGE (2010) winner. The complete list of EDGE winners is published in the October print issue of InformationWeek (India)