April 1, 2003 was a day of celebration at Lupin Ltd. Lupin, the Rs 957 crore (FY 2001-02) pharma major, manufactures intermediates, bulk actives and dosages, including phytomedicines, and conducts research in drug delivery systems, and new chemical entities. The organization had been doggedly working on going live with SAP R/3 and all its modules, all across the country at one go. Called as the big-bang approach to ERP implementation, Lupin took on the challenge of completely changing over from a tottering legacy system to SAP—across all its offices and manufacturing facilities in Aurangabad, Tarapur, Mandideep, and Ankleshwar. The technology details aside, Lupin’s ERP story is fascinating from a project management perspective.

Leading the ERP brigade from the technology side was Adi Shroff, CIO of Lupin Ltd. The IT team’s responsibility was to guide the management and ensuring that the IT infrastructure was in place. An eight-member steering committee comprising the presidents of all business units was set up. Additionally, a negotiation committee was set up. In May 2002, Lupin started considering and evaluating various products and consultants for the project. By July, the decisions were in place—SAP R/3 with all its modules; PriceWaterhouse-Coopers to help with the implementation; and IBM to provide the hardware. On the point of choosing a consultant Shroff advises, "Many companies try to cut corners here … there are those who do it for peanuts. But such implementations lack teeth."

The implementation started in early August and the target was to get it rolling by the end of the financial year. With eight months in hand, the Lupin team set about tackling the basics. That set the pace for the project. For example, the development server for SAP was up and running by the second week of August; nine days after the implementation started. Adds Shroff, "A ground rule was laid that every day’s back-up has to be taken at the end of the day. Else, the person loses his job."

A core team of 14 members was formed, not by randomly choosing people who were not loaded with other responsibilities and were free to handle other assignments. The process of choosing the 14 members was done with extreme rigor to get the best and brightest. To begin with, an exhaustive list of what was expected out of these members was created. And each one of them was rigorously interviewed before they were finally selected. Those who were empowered to take decisions on business processes through their deep understanding of the key processes and the integration between them along with an ability to appreciate IT was the key criterion. Though it may seem trivial, but the company showed the same pace of activity for putting up a guesthouse within days.

Neither were the PWC consultants spared. Each of the PWC consultants on the project was rigorously interviewed before they were taken on. This was to assess their competence and ability to jell well with the core team members. Alongside, a project office for 80 people with PCs, printers, communication, and separate meeting rooms was set up almost in a jiffy. The point here is that the company did not waste time taking decisions in such matters and put together the required resources so that precious project time is not wasted.

First off, the WAN with a backhaul leased line was put in place. Following this, Lotus Notes was successfully deployed for enterprise-wide messaging. This was followed by deployment of Notes workflow throughout the organization so that various teams could collaborate and share processes. Says Shroff, "Our belief is that there should be no response problem right from day 1." That is, no infrastructure constraint should come in the way- be it related to server hardware, bandwidth availability, software incompatibility, the LAN or even the PCs. Adds Shroff, "And where there were problems, decisions were taken immediately."

The other point was that customization was allowed only in extreme cases. Says Shroff, "I had mandated that 90-95 % of the software had to be used as it is because wonton customization does not deliver the full value of the software."

Says Shroff, "What is the point in twisting the software to your existing processes... that’s where you lose value."Where there was a business need, it wrote its own programs in SAP code and used it. For example, the system was not capturing secondary sales data well and knowing the inventory trapped with the consignment agent and the C&F agent was important.

Therefore the team went about developing their own program to get this done. Also, in the area of compliance with Indian tax laws, Lupin went ahead and procured a third-party solution from Trivandrum-based IVL Software. Here too they went big-bang and procured all the modules; reportedly the only company in India to do so.

"For the next six months, no new tech-implementation will be taken up. We will allow the SAP system to stabilize." Some teething problems are expected but the team is geared up for settling those issues at the first instance. After the initial period of six months, the implementation for SCM solutions will be taken up.

During the course of the implementation, certain ‘power-users’ were identified whose role was to continue handholding others. This team is being given specialized training in configuration to empower them to make configuration changes to run the system smoothly. Others who were physically away from the place of action were not left out. The team went to the factories and kept the unit heads involved to make them part of the entire project. This helped in getting their buy-in and acceptance before the project got over.

All users across the organization got trained for about six weeks and it was mandated that come April 1, 2003 everyone had to use the system. In the last few weeks, the team was busy migrating all the data from legacy systems to the ERP masters.

And there were still a few days left for April 1, 2003 and those who had been camping in Mumbai for eight months were packing their bags to go back to their respective locations on March 31.

Easwardas Satyan