Indian companies are increasingly looking at shorter ERP implementation cycles and usage of analytics solutions, in the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic.

Talking to BusinessLine , Guruprasad Gaonkar, APAC SaaS Leader - Office of Finance (ERP) & Digital Supply Chain, Oracle India, said that organisations are refreshing their ERP systems in order to be able to function in new normal. “This requires that software implementations be quicker, easier and less time consuming, so that they can respond to the changing situations in the least time possible,” he said.

Oracle has seen customers across the board such as Aurobindo Pharma, Hindalco, Transworld, amongst others who have refreshed their IT systems recently.

“The reason for this refresh has to do with the way IT systems were architected. The traditional ERP model was based on generation of records or logs, which was followed by understanding what business insights the system information generated and took several months to implement. However, in this new normal, the pyramid needs to be inverted, so that ERP functions on business insights upfront, with the help of AI and quickly set it up,” said Gaonkar.

Info access

This agility is also needed as information sits across IT systems of multiple stakeholders. Oracle has partnered with Transworld Group to provide a cloud-based technology platform that will improve operational efficiency across its shipping and logistics businesses and give information access to 1000 employees. The information access is being used to change or tweak business models.

“We want to transform from a shipping company to a technology company, providing services. The emphasis has to be technology driving business and not business driving technology. For that, you need to have a good backend with robust systems, and build technologies that people want to use,” said Ritesh S Ramakrishnan, Joint Managing Director, Transworld Group.

A lot of these changes are also happening to the change in mindset in the C-Suite. “Questions such as where to cut costs, focus in new business areas, everything needs a reset now,” stated Gaonkar.

Dynamic, error-free

Hindalco Industries had multiple challenges when it came to collection of data from various locations, and then filing financial reports on a real-time basis. Issues like dynamic update of numbers, multiple people working on reports (with each having different reviews), and then integrating these various reports into a single version under extremely tight deadlines was becoming cumbersome. The process was person-dependent, manual intervention was needed for casting and rounding off errors, and it had to be cross-referenced with other data points. Technology was used to address these pain points.

Similarly, Ballard Power Systems, is using Oracle cloud Supply Chain Management and Oracle Cloud ERP to aid its manufacturing process.

The global ERP software market was valued at $35.81 billion in 2018, and is projected to reach $78.40 billion by 2026, led by the manufacturing sector.

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