The Hindu Business Line : ICICI Infotech launches ERP package for SMEs

Mr Manoj Kunkalienkar, Executive Director and President, ICICI Infotech (right ) and Mr K.S. Natarajan, Managing Director, Trident Pneumatics, at a press conference in Chennai on Wednesday. - - Bijoy Ghosh

Chennai , June 2

ICICI Infotech today launched an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for the small and medium enterprises.

The ERP package - Orion Advantage - comes bundled with an HP dual processor Xeon server, Oracle 9i database, Windows 2003 server and costs about Rs 9.90 lakh and has a 15-user license.

An ERP package helps a manufacturer or any other business implementing it to manage all the important parts in the company such as product planning, parts purchasing, maintaining inventory and interacting with suppliers and customers.

ICICI Infotech officials told a press conference here today that Orion Advantage offered a set of business practice solutions for industry segments such as engineering, auto ancillary, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and IT distribution. Besides the cost advantage, the ERP package also came pre-configured. ICICI Infotech had mapped the processes specific to each industry segment into the package.

Mr Manoj Kunkalienkar, Executive Director and President, ICICI Infotech, said that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) offered a good market and ICICI Infotech hoped to become a leading solution provider to this segment.

Mr R.K. Kanthi, Deputy General Manager, ICICI Infotech, said there was no ERP package for the SMEs that bundled the server, database and operating system right now. That was the advantage ICICI Infotech offered to SMEs as Orion Advantage came bundled and pre-configured. Besides the high cost of generic ERP packages, their implementation time as far as SMEs were concerned was also long. Orion Advantage could be installed in 45 days.

ICICI Infotech had signed up six customers so far for the package and hoped to garner a 15 per cent market share of the SME segment, whose number in the country was estimated at 2.30 lakh.

Mr K.S. Natarajan, Managing Director, Trident Pneumatics Pvt Ltd of Coimbatore, one of the companies that had installed Orion Advantage, said that the company had tried three other ERP packages, all of which had failed, before settling on Orion Advantage.

Mr Kunkalienkar said that ICICI Infotech planned to move the two development centres in Chennai into a single location and double the staff strength from 300 now in the next two years.

The Chennai centres were involved in research and development of Orion ERP solutions and Premia, an insurance package.

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