Led by finance: Ramanuj Kankani, head of Solvay Business Services, India, played a central role in the installation of SAP systems at two of the chemical group's Indian sites. He explains how the project's attention to detail ensured a successful outcome.

Solvay is a multinational chemical group serving diversified markets worldwide. Founded in 1863 in Belgium, today it generates 90 per cent of its income from businesses that are global leaders in their fields. In India, the company owns four manufacturing sites. It also has a couple of joint ventures here.

There were several reasons behind Solvay's decision to implement SAP at two sites in India. One of these was the desire to improve the quality of their management and introduce better internal controls and reporting (the two entities belong to the same business unit and share a senior management team). The roll out would also give the business an opportunity to enhance the IT skills of employees and harmonise processes in line with regional and global standard operating procedures.

The SAP implementation project began in September 2013, with the target of going live in seven months. We formed a cross functional project team comprising representatives from business, IT, finance, sales, marketing and purchasing. External SAP consultants were brought in to work along side the in house IT team and ensure that we complied with all the relevant procedural requirements. Computer literacy was below par at both manufacturing units when the project started and people's knowledge of enterprise resource planning was limited. A big challenge was to encourage employees to visualise the benefits that their adoption of SAP would bring. Key requirements along the way would include requirement and gap analyses, country specific system development, user testing, "go or no-go" decisions and technical support after the implementation. Business continuity would be our...

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