Management Jukebox

By Debabrata Satpathy

But they can be taken care of any time. Bringing out the quality in the green grass is the real issue. Similarly, you are looking at the obvious and ignoring the real issues... ""A fascinating story about:

A corporate group grappling with the problems of its complex structure, people, data, information and MIS;

SAP, as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for the problems;

A professional, entrusted with implementing ERP and bogged down with insurmountable challenges;

A Mentor, who makes it a point that her protégé succeeds;

A magical set of tick boxes, that ensures success in ERP Projects;

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Jun 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389759716

Debabrata Satpathy

Debabrata Satpathy is a writer by passion, a Chartered Accountant by education and a leader by profession. He thrives to write about complex issues through interesting stories. He is a natural storyteller. The Management Jukebox is his debut book.Through his professional career, he has handled various assignments in the area of Finance and Management. He is a thought leader and considers himself very fortunate to manage high performing teams. He is madly enthusiastic about the fields of Automation, Enterprise Resource Planning and Artificial Intelligence, and consistently works towards practical use of those concepts in his professional arena. He is also passionate about mythology and history. Human Resource, being his area of interest, he also possesses a Post Graduate Diploma in Human Resource Management.He is forty-two years young and lives in Gurgaon, India, with his wonderful wife Recoreena and son Arnav. You can visit him at:www.thejukeboxblog.com

Book preview

WHERE DO YOU

STAND?

More often than not we are compelled (not choose) to change.

Decisions for implementation of

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

is all about change and we generally do not realise it,

till we have to.

I

THE BEDLAM

All hell broke loose on a bright and sunny Monday morning that had started to warm up for the week ahead. It was in the offing for quite some time and there were rumours doing the rounds since the week before. It did not occur to Adi, in the wildest of his imagination that he would find himself in such a mess. He looked out from his cubicle on the seventh floor of the monumental office building, standing tall in the thickly concreted cyber city of Gurgaon. He felt as if the thick glass wall had vanished and he stood exposed from the handsome height to the layers of concrete, steel and glass. Down below, the monorail rolled by and Adi looked at it with haplessness. Seemingly, all his hopes and expectations had been bundled and loaded in that tiny looking tube that was never coming back.

The Board of Directors met the day before in the spacious boardroom, on the top floor of the building, owned by the Skrull Group of companies. The building was among one of the costliest real estate premises in Gurgaon. It overlooked the National Highway Number Eight on one side, and few other architectural marvels on the other. With huge investments in Oil and Gas and infrastructure projects, the group stood erect on its well diversified business structure and strong financial fundamentals. The group was backed by equity holders, both from India and abroad, who had abundant faith in the management. External commercial borrowings at rock bottom rates had kept the average cost of borrowings low.

Skrull group appeared to be doing well to the onlookers and analysts, but only the management knew that it was about time the internal processes were streamlined. The CEOs of both the Oil and Gas and the Power companies met after a very eventful board meeting. They had some tough and long pending decisions to make. While aggressively pursuing with business expansions and diversifications, the internal systems and processes were almost forgotten for quite some time. It had been discussed in the meeting of the board of directors, that if the internal systems, controls and processes were not streamlined, the group would surely face the danger of riding a structure that was remotely predictable and barely responsive to the future demands of the targeted growth path.

The Oil and Gas division had started commercial production since 2006. In 2018, the company boasted of an employee base of about 1000 on payroll. Through the years, since 2006, the nameplate capacity of production had tripled. The corporate office at cyber city had about 150 employees and another 850 were spread across two plant locations. The power division that took off in 2012 had an employee base of about 1500 on the rolls and another 1000 working under contract. The corporate office in Gurgaon manned about 500 and the other 1000 employees were deployed across three project locations. Apart from the above, the corporate office also manned another 50 people working on contract, assisting the higher and middle management at various levels. The twenty-second to the twenty-fifth floors housed the top management, with the swankiest of the conference rooms, a health centre, swimming pool and other facilities boasting of the class of the corporate group.

Every morning, before entering the building, Adi would look up towards the top of the building and savour a moment or two with himself, dreaming about reaching one of those floors of power sooner than later. He started his professional career in 2012, after qualifying as a chartered accountant with fifth rank, pan India level. Adi joined Skrull LNG Ltd in the same year. At first, he joined as an entry level officer and was seated in a tiny workstation on the second floor. During the last six years, Adi had done quite well for himself, rising up to the level of manager, three levels up, with his own cubicle and a decently sized workstation overlooking a spectacular view of the corporate jungle around.

The last few months had been rough. Being worried about the constant nagging of the Board of Directors, the management had decided to shuffle the manpower, so that new ideas could be infused into different streams within various departments. In the process, Adi landed in the internal control and audit division, headed by Mr Raghuraman Parthasarathy. Raghu was in the division since 2006. At the level of Vice President and heading it since the last three years, Raghu adored his department. He was hoping that with the emphasis on the systems and processes, his otherwise dormant department might soon be in the business. Adi joined Raghu and his team consisting of seven people, five months ago. In the organisation structure, a manager was three levels below a vice president. Having spent almost five years in lucrative areas like project finance, corporate accounts group and corporate treasury, Adi could not really gel well in internal audit. Nothing much was happening there anyway to ignite some sparks of motivation in him. Raghu was a self-contented man, who loved his quiescent survival and hoped for a hike or two in position and financial status before retirement.

II

THE SUMMONS

The two CEOs needed to take some decisions as per the guidelines set by the Board of Directors. Few ideas were being contemplated for some time. One of the ‘Big Four’ consulting firms was hired a month ago to conduct a study and prepare a very high-level report to suggest, what kind of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), the business enterprise could implement. Not many in the organisation knew about the study. The CEOs did not want their sense of discomfort to achieve a contagious status in the organisation. The consulting firm very strongly recommended SAP to be implemented due to the following reasons:

•The structure of the business group was very complex, which called for great structuring capabilities with the proposed ERP solution. SAP was a clear winner there, as it offered great business structuring capability;

•The processes of the LNG, power and other group companies were very complex, which called for a robust business solution like SAP;

•After more than 10 years of operations in some of the businesses such as LNG and petrochemicals, there was huge historical data that needed to be structured and migrated to the new system. SAP offered a great solution in management and migration of the legacy data;

•The sensitivity of the LNG and power businesses, which had a very high interface with the government, needed robust data security and database management system, which only SAP could offer;

•Other ERP solutions in the market were either very low scale, considering the requirements of the Skrull Group or excelled in specific modules like finance, human resources etc. SAP scored here as well, because the entire business suite of SAP was considered very robust.

The decisions were quickly translated into a plan of action. The entire work was carried out on Sunday, April 1, 2018. The top floors were lit and abuzz during the weekend. Just before midnight, mails were shot in every direction downwards until the fifteenth floor. The Apples and Samsungs started buzzing and by 12.05 am, Monday, April 2, 2018, all the vice presidents and above were virtually served with a subpoena each, to assemble at the huge conference room, on the twenty-second floor, at 8.30 am sharp, for a very important meeting and announcement over breakfast. Last time, about two years ago, all of them had assembled there to celebrate the commissioning of the third expansion of the LNG terminal at Gujarat. The conference room could accommodate about one hundred people at a time and covered almost the entire twenty- second floor, leaving some space for housekeeping, pantry etc. It was seldom used for meetings. Rather, it was mainly used for seminars, trainings programs, induction programs etc., when there was a need for the group to display its grandeur to the