About CLCL

Century Laminating Company Limited (CLCL) has diversified interests in Plywood, Decorative laminates, Modular Furniture, Food products among others. The company today has a turnover of Rs. 5000 million FY 2007-08. It is the largest exporter of high pressure laminates in India. It is also the largest exporter of decorative laminates from India.

The company believes possession of advanced automated production facility is the building block of CLCL's drive towards excellence. CLCL's ethic driven, long-term business policies have led to have a high level of credibility among its customers and financial institutions.

The Business Challenge With opportunities aplenty in India Inc., CLCL was poised for robust growth. Robust growth could come from anywhere with so many a opportunity knocking around, however, a more critical factor was to sustain that growth with effective and efficient organizational capabilities. Given the ambitious objectives of the management of CLCL, and a detailed analysis of the path ahead, made it further clear, that an ERP could be an ideal and viable solution that may offer catalyst for growth in their progress.

Here are a few objectives that prompted the organization to evaluate ERP as a solution:

• Achieving Accelerated and Sustainable Growth pattern
• Achieving Agility in Overall Operations through informed decision making
• Attaining Controls through right information support
• Improving the Transparency in business transactions
• Minimize the Cost of decisions

The Lookout

Having arrived at consensus to implement an ERP to drive their sustained growth, CLCL went about evaluating various ERP packages available in the market like SAP R/3, Ramco Marshall, Oracle, and zeroed down to BaaN IVc4. It's a well know fact that BaaN had core strengths and flexibility making it the best suit for manufacturing companies, it also made the best impression on CLCL's decision makers as the perfect solution. The day was not far when the implementation process was to be kicked-off.

The Implementation

Having partnered with Baan, CLCL's implementation methodology was formulated as follows:

• System Study
• Designing & Mapping Business Processes
• Training & Implementation
• Rollout - Phase I (Year 2003-04)
• Rollout - Phase II (Year 2005-06)

Key Challenges

• Lack of operational truncation mapping in the previous implementation. Knowledge gap in Key users because of improper training and documentation during previous implementation.
• No DEM Configurations done during previous implementation.
• No Proper segregation of VRC for Live, India localization and customization.
• Lack of confidence in Key users and management on the product due to previous experience.
• Faulty Configuration of chart of Accounts and integration mapping in previous implementation

For CLCL, its branches were the points of contact with customers where the major challenges were:

• Lead time from order capturing to delivery of material may not exceed 15 mins.
• No. of calls received per day, an average of 400, out of which approx. 200 orders are to be booked and delivered had to be done by a single executive.

The challenge was taken head-on after a discussion with respective process owners. MSL delivered to the expectations of CLCL by creating an interface over BaaN IV C 4 which could manage the whole order capturing to invoice process in less than 2 minutes thereby reducing the total order to delivery time, and management of multiple order booking.

After having successfully implemented this model in a record time of 15 days and stabilization time of 7 days, CLCL's management decided to roll out the same model to its existing network of 16 braches located all over India in an ambitious time frame of 6 months.

MSL yet again took the challenge head on, and came out with a project plan which made it possible to achieve the ambitious targets set by CLCL's management.

Value-addition through Integration

• Integration with indigenous CRM software-
• Capture the customer interaction, monitor & fulfill customer commitments, and keep record of deviations for future references.
• Linking up with a 24-hour automated SMS / Fax / e-mail facility to provide access of valuable information to the customer like Availability of Stock, Ledger, Order position etc.
• Automated Letter drafting facilities for reminders, reports, status etc.,
• Creating & Maintaining better stock visibility & inter branch movement leading to faster deliveries
• Enhanced Complained Redressal with the response time of 48 hours
• Total compliance of regulatory/ statutory norms through a compliance module to the concerned process owners.
• Integration with Intranet portal for our internal & external customers & other stake-holders-
• Creating a knowledge base to share various corporate documents, presentations, reports & training resources to end users.
• Generate a wide variety of reports from ERP ranging from Stock Related Reports, Sales Reports, and debtors' management Reports to Audit Tools.
• A simple mail based service request procedure to avail any new service or for modification/ amendment in existing software

Engagement Scope

• Implementation on Baan IV c 4 across the organization
• Implementation of Infor Work Flow
• Implementation of Infor CPM (Cognos)
• Implementation of Infor ERP LN FP2 in Furniture Division (Including Turnkey Projects and integration with MS Projects)