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After acquiring Western Bakeries in 2007, Almarai had to convert its ERP system from Oracle to SAP in just 104 days – and using only one team to support both companies. Imthishan Giado reports.
As IT implementations go, enterprise resource planning (ERP) ones are among the hardest. Not only do they require a deep understanding of the processes and policies that underpin a firm, but successful execution also requires absolute commitment at the boardroom level. This can be a daunting prospect for an organisation and from a project sense it can often be hugely expensive.
So ERP is tough to implement. But few companies made it as difficult for themselves as Saudi Arabia’s Almarai. The dairy company embarked on a plan to convert Jeddah-based acquisition Western Bakeries from its previous Oracle implementation to a SAP-based one in just 104 days – while at the same time maintaining its operations in Jeddah. Amit Chakravarty, SAP application manager for Almarai explains the scale of the task.
“We implemented whatever we have in the mother Almarai company, minus human capital management (HCM) – so finance and control (FICO), materials management and production planning (MMPP), plant maintenance (PM) and business intelligence. They didn’t have a BI system before, they had reporting via Business Objects. We had a lot of work to do in their business process to bring the whole thing into the fold of SAP,” he says.
Western Bakeries was acquired at the close of 2007. Chakravarty and his team went down to Jeddah to examine the firm’s existing business processes in March 2008 and make the preperations for the migration from Oracle to SAP.
“After that, the normal cycle of implementation occurred – so we took about two to three weeks for that. We quickly figured out the to-be processes, and there was other software as well, which was interfacing with Oracle, such as one they had called WAN Man which we had to keep intact. After the to-be process, we went into realisation, unit testing and end-to-end user acceptance testing.”
In March, Chakravarty set the go-live date for the conversion project for August 6 2008 – and Western Bakeries did meet that date. It’s both swift and impressive – when one considers this is an ERP implementation – and he explains the reasons why.
“There are several contributing factors, but two major ones. One is that company’s higher management executive level of understanding of ERP was pretty good. There were one or two people at the top who had a very good level of understanding of what it entails to make an ERP work. The second thing is well, the skill level of my team. A combination of these two factors have made it work,” he recalls.
Chakravarty awards his 22-strong team with the lion’s share of the credit. For the conversion project, he employed six members to oversee it with additional staff on hand to assist during the data migration phase. Three contractors were also brought in from outsourcers Cherry Tech in India for supporting the MM, FI and PP modules – a task Chakravarty could not split among his team because they operated out of Riyadh and needed to support regular Almarai operations.
