Monday, February 23, 2004		Feature

SAP India, a subsidiary of SAP AG, was set up in 1996. Registered in Bangalore, SAP India has its corporate office in Mumbai and branch offices in Delhi and Kolkata. The company is responsible for sales of software solutions, consulting, support through life cycle, training and certification of its users, partners and individuals.

The company’s customer list includes leading companies like ONGC, Wipro, Infosys, IndianOil, ITC, Ranbaxy, Hero Honda and Bajaj Auto to name a few.

Excerpts from an interview with Srinivas Rao, Director Sales, SMB, SAP India

The domestic information technology (IT) industry saw a robust growth in 2003 as more companies and government adopted technology, thus scaling up the sales of PCs, networking equipment and software such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) to new heights. The Indian ERP market is said to have registered a 26 per cent growth in the last year to move up to Rs 250 crore, as against a negative growth posted last year.

The most encouraging trend that was seen in 2003 was that more and more companies invested in IT to improve their efficiencies as against an earlier trend to cut spending on IT. Besides, ERP is no longer seen as an additional IT investment but a must-have venture. Another interesting development was the increasing convergence of ERP, SCM (supply chain management) and CRM (customer relationship management). Besides this, the SMB (small and medium business) segment are also looking at IT in a big way. According to an IDC report, almost 60 per cent of the IT market in India consists of SMB customers.

Definitely. A good SCM package can decrease the total network inventory for supply chain thereby increasing the inventory turns. Investing in good software will also lower resource expenditures that occur as a result of maintaining disparate systems. Quick access to information enabling better customer service levels are some other advantages of an SCM solution.

The manufacturing industry was among the first to capitalise globally on the benefits of an ERP solution and now the future looks encouraging in sectors like telecom, BFSI and the government.

Our experience suggests that SMBs invest into solutions not just to manage their operations (which they already are capable of doing with their existing manual systems) but because they aspire to grow and they invest into solutions to manage their growth and to benchmark themselves against large organisations in their industry. This puts a lot of pressure on SMBs as, they not only need a functionally rich offering ... but at the same time also lack the budget and internal resources to be able to implement this. They also cannot sustain the long implementation periods typically required by ERP implementations and that’s what essentially holds them back from implementing business software solution. What SMBs look for in packaged software is the combination of solid technology, scalability, and ability to offer lower total cost of ownership.

Small companies aspire to become large organisations and hence want to implement processes that will benchmark them against the larger companies and later enable them to compete with the larger organisations. They seek solutions that are fast to implement and easy to adapt. Solutions that offer scalability and low total cost of ownership lure the SMBs the most. Companies should also take into account the time of deployment, implementation, track record of the vendor in the particular industry, domain knowledge and best practices that he brings to the table.