The art of the impossible

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CHAKRAVARTY: Truthfully speaking, many of the things we did over here, in the time we had, were too good to be true.

As a result, the Almarai team had to regularly commute between Riyadh and Jeddah for two week stints, always with at least two members stationed at Western Bakeries – a consultant’s life, as Chakravarty puts it. One aspect that was not always welcome is trying to massage the users into understanding the change to a completely different ERP system, but as he remembers, the influence of senior management was a definite bonus.

“People were given a strong message that this is what the company wanted and that key people were needed to participate. The other thing was that there were capable people in the business itself who were willing to take it up. Wherever we had some reluctance, we had to bridge it with some kind of coercion,” states Chakravarty.

Not everyone, as he recalls, needed to be ‘coerced’: “The guy who is now next to the CFO in that company was the erstwhile CFO when we brought over the company. He and his team went through every GL account, loading the opening balances. In my six to eight implementations that I’ve done, I’ve never seen some team checking all the GL accounts and balances. It was a full scale check – maybe they were convinced as soon as we went live or just before that for the pure reason that we were so high on accuracy and so low in terms of our deviation from normal.”

Of course, the major challenge for Chakravarty was simultaneously overseeing the conversion of the 50 users at Western Bakeries by maintaining his own 570 users at Almarai HQ.

He attempts an explanation of how he balanced the colossal workload: “I wish I had an easy answer. First of all, I don’t believe in going by modules in my team, even though we recruit people by module experience. We do not have ownership by modules, we have ownership by processes. That’s important because if you say procure-to-pay process, then a person who might have an MM background but he is supposed to take the process up to payment. That is one thing which we follow very assiduously,” he declares.

“We’ve got a primary owner and a secondary owner – and mind you, here we are all expats so people have their leaves also, not to talk of personal exigencies. A big user to support and a new company to completely convert and develop? That’s a fine balance, but we did it and we went live at a declared date without even a single reschedule. In fact, we did not miss on any of the declared project dates, none of them,” continues Chakravarty.

It’s certainly rare for the region for a project of this magnitude, and Chakravarty admits that the ease of implementation was unprecedented: “Truthfully speaking, many of the things we did over here were too good to be true. Not one date in the project missed. Within the theme, we had some challenges; one or two processes had to be rejigged, but all within the dates. After go-live, there were no hiccups because this is a food industry. Delivery, dispatch and shelf life is very important. You can waste product very soon if you do something funny. None of them happened. Honestly speaking, I was anticipating some trouble. That’s why I was based out of Jeddah for five more days after go-live just waiting for some trouble to happen. But it didn’t.”

Now that the implementation’s complete, Chakravarty is impressed with the improvements to operations: “The payment processes have been centralised to a great extent. Whenever a M&A takes place, the operational accounts and corporate finance have to be integrated into the mother company – and not to forget, the balance sheet and profit and loss also have to merge with the overall company – and then to be published.

“All of these things have to happen in a very smooth way. To give just one example, they [Western Bakeries] used to have eight days of closure time. We have cut it down to three days. That’s a massive reduction,” he concludes.

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