SHV Energy is an LPG distribution company with the brand name of ‘Super Gas’ and is headquartered in Hyderabad. The company specialises in providing energy solutions and has an extensive infrastructure that includes LPG import terminals, LPG filling plants and a distribution network to service its industrial and commercial customers across the country. The company had been using legacy applications that were not integrated and were incapable of meeting with its growth plans.

In the competitive gas distribution industry with its dynamic requirements, the company faced rising hydrocarbon prices and pressure from customers vis-à-vis rising energy costs. Further, in order to fulfill the requirements of profitability as well as accountability to stakeholders, it had to reduce its operating costs.

Super Gas was using a customized Tally solution for its operations in 25 plants countrywide for its core functions—order processing, inventory control and accounting. The excise module was also outside the Tally systems running separately. One of the primary limitations of the Tally systems was that each of the 25 plants has its own database, leading to inaccurate and duplicate data. Data from all the core operations across the 25 plants was manually synchronized with the corporate headquarters (HO) in Hyderabad. The lack of timely availability of structured data was resulting in delayed decision-making and having an impact on the productivity of the organization.

Before evaluating ERP vendors, Super Gas spent considerable time in understanding how the ERP could work in a real-time scenario, unders tanding the processes and what changes it would have to make in its processes. This experience was valuable as it helped the company reduce the implementation time. The company evaluated as many as six ERP vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Ramco and SSA Global. Only SAP and Oracle came close to meeting the company’s requirements. Gupta explains, “SAP has a strong experience in India and globally, sufficient trained skills on SAP and hence its case was stronger than the others. We were impressed with its experience, expertise and large customer-base. Additionally SAP’s ERP solution is tightly integrated with good control systems. We concluded that SAP will take us in the right direction and that we will benefit in the long run.”

Super Gas has managed to achieve ‘Go Live’ in six months covering seven modules in 25 locations simultaneously using the big-bang approach of implementation. The project was kicked off on February 1, 2006, and was completed on August 1, 2006. The modules implemented include production planning, sales and distribution, materials management, financial accounting, controlling, project systems, plant maintenance, customer service and the payroll module in HR. After evaluating two to three vendors, the company selected Hyderabad-based Intelligroup as the implementation partner for the project. The project started with a focused team headed by Diwakar.

“It meant participation of various personnel across the organization which had an impact on running the business on a day-to-day basis, but active involvement contributed to the project’s success,” says Diwakar. There were 18 members from Super Gas and an equal number from Intelligroup. Commitment and support of the top management also helped.

One of the biggest challenges was deciding to go live at all 25 locations simultaneously. Gupta says, “The idea of taking a big-bang approach to implement at 25 locations within six months was two-fold—we had gained enough expertise on implementing ERP before the evaluation—and had re-engineered our business processes to suit the package’s requirements. Rolling out the ERP in parts would have given an impression of us lacking confidence in the system and there could have been a possibility of the Western region using Tally and the South being on SAP. It would have created data problems.”

Diwakar adds, “Although change management was a big thing, there was no resistance to the new package.” With SAP in place, the organization has seen a sea change in all its major business areas and this necessitated realignment of processes as the company moved from a manual to an integrated system. Today, there are about 100 users and the implementation is stable. Being an integrated package, each employee realises that what he does ultimately has an impact on the others in the organization.

Accurate real-time data helps make decisions faster: “With SAP, there is improved visibility and control across processes at Super Gas and now we are more confident in our decision-making because of the availability of timely, consistent and accurate data. We are still getting used to the system and we have started realising the benefits,” says Diwakar.

The implementation of SAP is expected to enhance productivity, optimise costs, provide better customer service, enable better partner collaboration and improve the speed of decision-making. The company would like to implement simple and best practices in order to achieve enhanced efficiency and effectiveness through SAP in sync with its growth plans. After reaping the benefits from the current implementation, the Super Gas is looking forward to using other modules of SAP such as SCM, BI and CRM in a couple of years.