Summary Of Keda's SAP Implementation

KEDA’s SAP Implementation

KEDA, a manufacturer of Ceramics Machinery was founded in 1992. The other major offerings by Keda involved stone processing, building materials processing and energy resource management. In this industry, managing infrastructure for inventory management was of utmost importance because of the diverse, customizable offerings across multiple plants. Each key business unit such as logistics, sales & marketing, inventory management, production were all acting autonomously. Thus for the industry to sustain, there was a need to move from decentralization to centralized system, which was the major reason why the CEO wanted to for ERP system, which would ensure computerization and greater connectivity & ultimately high market

Besides its implementation would be so much difficult.

But somehow KEDA went for computerization in 2000. It faced a lot of trouble as vendor of MRP-II system has backed out. But with a proper planning, these issues could resolved.

The existing problems were identified, business requirements were collected from various management levels & objectives were set.

Next challenge was to search for an ERP vendor. It was a tough job to do, but ultimately it shortlisted 9 vendors & asked them to showcase their offerings in front of the senior management. After strategically rating these offerings & closely understanding the vendor’s offerings to the competitors, SAP emerged as the winner.

Then the job at hand was to assemble the implementation team, which comprised mostly of key users, consultants, IT officers. Here the top managers of various departments were selected to form a team. Each was assigned a module and was responsible for the workflows an operational details for that module. The main players in this team were the key users who reflected business practices correctly. There was a lot of resistance to this arrangement, but the senior management was supportive and constructed a reward system to motivate the ones who were opposing the

Also there were suggestions that cultural complications might arise in the Chinese setting and particularly opposition to technological changes might arise in the Chinese context due to feared loss of both status and discretion and use of unrecognized performance metrics. The effect of system going online was workflow and operations changing dramatically, users in some departments not supportive of the ERP initiative. Even some said that the work has become tedious. The autonomous working of different departments got affected as can be seen in the case where materials have to be checked in to and out from the warehouse. Such resistance was mainly because of redistribution of power and centralization. A lot of resistance was seen from managers of different departments, but they were shown the exit route & new appointments were made to ensure no conflict of interest.

Despite being criticized a lot, this new system turned out to be a huge success. The fruitful results of this new ERP system included:

o More transparency in information flow across departments o Price analysis could be done