While the manufacturing segment has seen high IT investments, some segments like alcoholic beverages seemed to have missed the bus.

No wonder, the future roadmaps of the two prominent players in this sector, Vijay Mallya’s UB Group and Chhabria’s Shaw Wallace, show marked similarity. Both have ERP implementation as their key IT projects for 2004 and also have earmarked about Rs 6-8 crore as the budgetary outlay for their IT strategy.

C S Subramanian, AVP, IT & MIS, Shaw Wallace admits that his company has really never been tech savvy and investment on IT has traditionally been a low priority area. And even when it started investing in IT a couple of years back, enterprise apps that integrate multiple businesses across locations was never the preferred area of focus.

"Till now, we never had the time to go in for ERP. We were only busy with standardization of our servers, OS, standard applications as well as connectivity protocols across geographies," Subramanian says.

The key initiatives in this phase of standardization involved closing on IBM servers across multiple locations as well as implementing Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook.

After standardization, the next step was the launch of an e-procurement initiative with an aim to automate the Shaw Wallace supply chain.

This initiative, started two years back, for which Shaw Wallace tied up with both Wipro 01markets and baazee.com, has so far netted savings to the tune of 8-10% for the company.

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