Company profile

The India Cements Ltd was established in 1946 with its first plant Sankar Nagar in Tamilnadu in 1949. The Company has grown to seven plants spread over Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh cater to all major markets in South India and Maharashtra with a current capacity10 million tons per annum, has become the largest producer of cement in South India. The Company is the market leader with a market share of 28% in the South. The Company has access to huge limestone resources and plans to expand capacity by de-bottlenecking and optimization of existing plants as well as by acquisitions. The Company has a strong distribution network with over 10,000 stockists of whom 25% are dedicated

Business Need

• Multi locational, company (7 plants and 23 depots)
• Multi products, Brands & Packs
• Voluminous transactions - (example average of about 2000 invoices per day and collection of about 1500 cheques)
• Thousands of Dealers & vendors spread over various States
• Common as well as different materials & equipment requirement at various Plants
• Batch Processing
• No uniform process in all the locations
• No common codes for Parties (Same party account maintained at various locations)
• No common codes for Inventories, while most of the inventories used are common across all the Plants.
• Lack of Control Inaccuracy, delay and no uniformity in reporting Information - flow - not timely
• Restricted Mobility - to access information
• Delay in identifying errors & mistakes
• Corporate involved more in “doing” rather than managing and planning.
• Sub optimal utilisation of resources.

Project Challenges

• Sales & Marketing
  - No Systems support for Sales Planning & Target fixing
  - Lack of planning the inventory at Stockpoints
• Order booking & Credit management:
  - As Credit limits were not available in the Systems, order approval within the credit limit was not ensured
  - Parties’ accounts were processed in batches.
  - Sales personnel had to be in the Plants to book orders, thereby reduced time for them to be in the market place.
• Collection & Funds transfer:
  - Collection at various locations (by Sales personnel)
  - Deposit of cheques at few locations (HO and some plants)
  - Criss Cross movement of funds resulting in costs and loss of time.
• Branch Expenses reimbursement:
  - Reimbursement for all the sales personnel were done at Corporate Office thereby diluting the intended purpose of the Corporate Office.
  - Lack of proper analysis of such expenses.
• Salesman Management- target fixing:
  - Systems didn’t provide support to measure Performance of individual salesman against targets
• Tax Assessments:
  - Tax class applicable to a customer was maintained manually. - Risk of inaccurate calculation
  - Sales day books for Sales tax returns prepared manually.
• Logistics:
  - No optimised despatch of cement from various locations to various parties - with the combination of constraints such as Price, freight, supply & demand.

Solutions- inDice

InDice, a complete business ERP solution was customised to provide real-time solution to gain control on all aspects of the business process in the areas of Sales & Distrubution, Finance & Accounting, Material Management, Plant/Factory MIS, Plant/Factory Maintenance, Logistic Planning, HR Management & Payroll.

Benefits

• Secure - Permission based on authentication for secure access
• Simple - Easy implementation process
• Network - Supports hybrid network and works well even in low bandwidth
• Comprehensive - Designed & Developed by experts with several years of development work
• Reports - Generates more than 5000 Real Time Data Analysis Reports
• Add-on - Automated e-mail and sms alerts