Today, India is transforming itself as an efficient business hub and all major players in the field are working constantly towards promoting and expanding their market. In this scenario Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) will be playing a major role in growth and optimum utilization of resources in the big business enterprises as well as SMEs. Companies have a pre-conceived belief that ERP solution helps in streamlining the functionality and technicality of the processes in an organization.
ERP software solutions were initially used only for back office functions. They were not given the due importance and treated just like another supporting function (Reasons like lack of awareness formed one part while other reasons were costs and technical difficulties). Since this led companies to go in for ERP they automatically started to learn more about it either by force or felt need as they were left with no alternative. This indirectly created the awareness among companies. They learned more on ERP and realized its diverse applications. Finally they resorted to use ERP for the whole of the company and stopped the idea of restricting it to mere back office functions. Many companies are still hesitating to invest in ERP due to the exorbitant costs involved in it.
But still a plethora of companies like HUL and Indian Oil boast of having a good ERP solution for their businesses. (Indian Oil’s ERP ‘Manthan’ took 8 years in successful implementation). This is a common phenomenon, as most of the corporates look to rake in the ROI after the implementation. All looked hunk dory to me till I was faced with reality on the ground.
Background
Being a Mechanical Engineer, with limited knowledge of IT, I was working with a leading Indian steel company and was responsible for the mechanical maintenance of their steel melting shop, which made 6 million tonnes of steel. The production process is highly automated with the process being controlled by 3 levels of automation. The plant boasts of the highest plant availability in the world which stands at a staggering 93 %. (Plant Availability is the total time a plant is available for production in a year, excluding the time spent on maintenance and other activities). Furthermore the plant supplies steel to all the leading car manufacturers in the world.
All this seems to be really impressive, but for a maintenance engineer it translates into a nightmare as he would get a downtime of only 7 % in a year including all the breakdowns. So, to meet such requirements one needs to ensure a robust maintenance process, which has loads of planning and data analysis. To meet these requirements of the maintenance functions, the company implemented SAP’s Plant Maintenance (SAP-PM) module.
SAP Plant Maintenance
SAP PM has a logical and a structural classification based on the layout or the process. Most of configurations in this case were structure oriented as this was a process industry. So it was always difficult for the supervisors to log the cases onto the system. There were a lot of prerequisites, which were never taken care of and were left for the operating departments to fulfil.
Reality Check
The SAP is an enterprise based solution which helps the maintenance function to record all maintenance concerns, for example creating time based maintenance modules, creating automated job lists, etc. From the manager’s perspective, apart from creating and recording data, it provides great analytical tools for getting holistic picture of the maintenance activities. One can identify the hitches which regularly cause breakdown, the potential spots of improvement, cost cutting and other value engineering areas.
As I took the charge of a manager, I wanted to know, how the much talked about SAP PM was working, and what our performance was. My department had a SAP PM Utilization index of 85%, but I could understand, there was something wrong in the way we reported data. As with any IT system, the system was as good as the data we fed into it. So, all our compliance was against a few data points that my supervisors fed into the system, mainly at the end of the month. This meant that all the analysis was redundant, and we were not using a tool effectively. I could feel a sense of discomfort with the IT system. The supervisors felt comfortable in filling a manual log book. As per the maintenance practice the company still operated in the reactive maintenance philosophy, where-as we needed preventive and proactive maintenance.
Automated Maintenance
We started by taking everyone into confidence regarding the utility of the ERP, which was followed by a mandate to use the software as the manager would only monitor the daily jobs through SAP. We faced a lot of difficulties, created the basic structure and loaded various job sheets as we went along. It was a very tedious process as it took a lot of extra work and constant monitoring.
Finally we could complete it for a sub section, and all our maintenance orders and inspection job sheets for that section were generated by the system. The operator just got the list and ensured action. We were also able to cut down on a lot of unnecessary jobs compared to the last year. The overall breakdowns did not reduce but gradually we moved towards more predictive maintenance rather than reactive maintenance.
The Final Word
It’s a real tough job to implement an ERP, but it is equally difficult to ensure the full utilization of the tool. It requires a lot of persuasion, commitment and discipline of the top leadership to ensure the utilization. Once the employees realize the benefits by experiencing themselves, the process gets automated. We should remember that working on a computer does not come as naturally to common people as writing does. So this inconvenience has a trade-off with a greater convenience realized in the long run.{t}
An enduring laidback and frustrating system has motivated Nitesh to become extremely dexterous to explore the most effective and efficient ways to outdo it. Apart from chatting and bullying around, this ‘freelance consultant’ born and brought up at Bokaro, learnt the trade secrets of ‘screwing’ at NIT Jamshedpur. He then baked himself in the crucibles of TATA Steel for 3 years, which led him to fall straight into hel[L] better known as IIM [L]ucknow.
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