Eveready plans to fine-tune battery business

Eveready Industries India (EILL), the flagship company of the Williamson Magor group, expects a 20 per cent reduction in pipeline inventory, a 10 per cent reduction in work-in-process inventory coupled with forecast accuracy growth from 60 to 85 per cent and increase in retail outlet from 1.5 million to 2 million by implementing Oracle e-business suite enterprise application software on a Linux platform.

This implementation is in keeping with the need to align the company's information technology infrastructure with the business goal that of holding monopoly in the battery business with 50 per cent market share by 2005, said Ajit Ghatak, senior general manager, national carbon plant, EIIL.

EIIL has a 45 per cent market share in the battery business and 85 per cent in the flashlights category. The key addressable areas to be directly benefited from the application would be manufacturing, finance and sales and distribution, Arup Choudhary, general manager, information technology, said.

The total implementation cost is Rs 5.5. crore and the return on investment will take a period of three years, Choudhary said.

The application would also include a collaborative hub which will cater to and network between diverse segments such as customers, suppliers, sub contractors and the sales force.

EIIL has over 400 sales personnel who are constantly sending market information to the company and after the deployment of the Oracle application is complete they will be able to do so directly from the field through the internet which would be stored and processed as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions thus reducing the time for reacting to changes in the marketplace, Choudhary explained.

According to Choudhary, EIIL is deploying Oracle applications for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, eBusiness intelligence across 68 locations of the company which includes eight factories, 15 branch offices and the rest are warehouses.

Choudhary said that prior to adopting the Oracle applications, EIIL used custom developed software to meet the company's requirements such as MATMAN (materials management) package in the manufacturing segment, Salad II (sales and distribution), software for the given sales and distribution segment and FACT (financial consolidation, reporting and transaction system running on Sybase for the financial segment.

EIIL is on a cost reduction drive and chose to implement Oracle applications on a Linux platform and are running it on a Red Hat advanced server 3.0 and the Linux deployment has helped Eveready reduce its operating system licensing cost by 48 per cent, said Choudhary.

Oracle has six such applications customers in eastern India and 400 across the country.