The Client

A 90 year old company based in Mumbai, that employs more than 500 people, it is India's largest perfumery and fragrance manufacturer, with a turnover of over Rs. 400 crores.  

With factories in Mumbai and Gujarat, the organization manufactures a range of fragrances and flavours. The nature of their business makes it crucial to safeguard the intellectual and creative knowledge of a few key people.

Business Drivers

The management had a clear vision of IT being the enabler of their business in the long run. The organization was willing to allocate substantial budgets to the right software systems, with a long term view.

The business is rapidly increasing with increasing demand and the management's focus on expansion. With this growth, robust systems were needed to manage operations. The existing applications were not geared to handle the increase in scale.

Feature Upgrade

The client  was using a basic MS Access based system and some other applications to manage their business. There was no integrated system in place and the features required for an enterprise application were not in place, so new features needed to be introduced.

Technology Upgrade

The management wished to create a centralized system with a robust transaction engine and database. The existing applications were developed solely on MS Access and there were many versions of the code deployed on different machines. Data was also scattered and generation of consolidated reports was problematic.

Arion's Solution

Arion first performed a business study of the operations and came up with a detailed Business Requirements Specifications for the ERP. 

As consultants, Arion evaluated several out-of-the-box ERP products, but soon found out that the specialized business specific requirements of the organization in all modules meant that a tailor-made software application was the best approach.

Arion undertook the development and implemented the ERP in 8 months, building the application from scratch. All legacy data that was present in disparate systems was migrated to the new system.

The ERP included the following modules and was developed with a distributed architecture in mind:

• Purchase
• Inventory
• Stores
• Quality Control
• Production
• Blending and Packing
• Dispatch
• Sales
• Accounts
• Administration
• Excise
• Distribution (exports and domestic)

Arion recommended the following Technologies:

• Operating System: Window
• Development Platform: Visual Basic with extensive use of DCOM
• Database: PostgreSQL

BENEFITS

• Improved Process Efficiency

Several manual operations have been automated and due to on-demand availability of information, delays that exist in production, dispatch and purchase have been eliminated.


• Integrated Data Management

Since the system was totally integrated across all departments, redundant data was eliminated from the system, assuring data integrity. Also, it became easier to prepare reports and retrieve relevant information without referring to external information sources.

• Reduction of Inventory

Previously, due to lack of proper information and lead times associated with the inventory management process, it was safer to stock raw materials to guard against outages. With the new system in place, inventory levels could be greatly reduced.

• Greater Accountability

Since all transactions were recorded and were available to the management on demand, there was greater accountability among employees across all departments. There were rigid structures built into the ERP to minimize the incidence of fraud.