Shri Sant Gajanan Maharaj Trust : ERP Deployment

Raising the bar of transparency and accountability to strengthen faith

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

ERP deployment in various organizations across verticals is commonplace. However, ERP deployment at a religious trust is something definitely unheard of. The Shri Sant Gajanan
Maharaj Trust is located in Shegaon, Maharashtra, and is the second largest pilgrimage destination in Western India. This non profit organization serves society through its vocational training centers, educational institutes, special schools for the mentally challenged, pharmacy stores, medical dispensaries, and health-camps. The Trust also manages a temple, which attracts over 3,000 devotees per day.

This number can surge to more than 100,000 per day during festive seasons and other special occasions. The Trust has a network of nine branches spread across different parts of the country, involved in promoting various social welfare programs.

The Trust finances its philanthropic initiatives through the donations it receives, sale of publications and souvenirs and subsidized on-campus lodging and boarding services. It receives donation from various sources including international remittances.

Over the last few years, the day-to-day operations of the Trust had become quite complex. Additionally, the Trust had to handle approximately 20,000 transactions per day pertaining to various activities. It also had to manually update records of transactions with over 1,000 suppliers and contractors.

The managing committee of the Trust recognized that manual practices for managing sales, purchase and accounting operations resulted in lower productivity and affected the service response time despite the high-caliber administrative expertise of its staff.

The ERP Deployment team (starting from left): S D Phuse, P V Bokad, T P Marode, D P Tarale, K B More, P R Joshi, and P I Chaure. The team was headed by Shrikant D. Patil. To expand it s scope of charitable services, the Sant Gajanan Maharaj religious trust took aid of technology in the form of an ERP solution deployment

This called for a solution that would simplify processes, enhance operational efficiency, minimize the cycle-time involved in transaction processing and ease the work pressure on its staff. An ERP system was the need of the hour to significantly raise the bar of transparency and accountability.

After evaluating various options, SAP ERP 6.0 was zeroed in on. Patni Computers Systems was selected as the implementation partner in the process. Patni conducted a detailed study of business processes pertaining to management of finance, accounting, inventory, sales and distribution.

The implementation process itself was divided into five phases covering the entire project lifecycle comprising preparation, blueprint, realization, final preparation and go-live.

Moving away from functional silos and creating effective cross-functional processes that are truly integrated via an SAP ERP system was not an easy task. Most of the Trust's functions were unique. Hence, there was a need to enhance certain standard functionalities of the SAP ERP to meet those requirements.

Sri Sant Gajanan Maharaj Sansthan ( Shegaon) is one of the first temple trusts in India to implement an ERP system with the help of Patni Computer Systems, one of the leading global IT service providers

The use of SAP ERP was spread across various lines of business including the hostel, the medical centers and temple. This made it necessary to acquire the buy-in of the multiple stakeholders who were involved in the process of managing the activities of the Trust.

The biggest challenge to change came from the end users of the solution. Most of the staff members were not conversant with English language and happened to be the first time computer users. This issue was addressed by rolling out a change management program. The management committee of the Trust discussed the benefits of the new system with all the members of staff and assured that its implementation would not affect the employment of the staff. It also imparted end-user training to the entry level staff and assigned the elder members of the staff with the roles in managing operations.

The manual practices were not discontinued for six months even after “go-live” stage. to ensure that its staff achieved a certain level of comfort with the new system.

After the deployment, automated information exchange between departments about the material and cash flow has simplified most of the processes and boosted the efficiency.

A significant improvement has been witnessed in the process of receiving donations and distributing it for various welfare activities.

The number of donation counters has been reduced to one resulting in an 80% gain in manpower utilization. The Trust is able to provide complete transparency into the collection and utilization of donations.

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