44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

Continued from page: 10

Friday, June 03, 2005

Tools Planning System Titan Industries

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Project Head: A C Chidanand, Group Manager, SAP team 
Location: Watch Division, Hosur, Tamil Nadu

The tools planning system is meant to help Titan's tools department to analyze tools' life, re-estimate tools' requirements to ensure that the production doesn't get delayed. The company had been using SAP R/3 and SAP APO systems for their demand planning and availability check during production planning. However, the system didn't have a proper tools planning system, and the customized solution that had been implemented earlier was too complicated. 

The problem was that all parts required for watch assembly didn't reach on time or in the right quantities in the watch assembly plant. As a result, there was misalignment in the plant, leading to production delays. A full-fledged study of the existing supply chain process was done. This included a review of the processes for demand planning, manufacturing, sales and distribution. At the end of the study, the company decided to implement a system that would calculate the approximate number of tools required as per the demand and projected lifecycles. 

There were two challenges in implementing this system. One was that it had to integrate with the existing SAP R/3 system without touching SAP's source code. And second had to do with the transactions carried out by the tools planning system itself. While a user would perform one transaction on the system, the system did several transactions internally. Even if one of them failed, reconciliation had to happen, leading to inconsistencies in the database. The solution that was created for this problem was that if one transaction failed, the other transactions were called back. If you've ever used a SAP system, then you will definitely know of how difficult it is to track the flow of information in it. SAP or any other ERP system for that matter face the problem of batch roll back, ie, if you feed any information to it, you don't know where all it will go. So if you want to reverse the transaction, it can be pretty difficult since you don't know where the data is sitting and what all it has affected.

The project was executed in three phases. First, the discover phase, which involved understanding the supply chain system. Second, the diagnose phase, which involved studying each of the issues identified in the first phase one and providing alternative solutions. Third and last was the define phase, wherein a detailed solution was proposed and pilots done. Infact, even the supply chain was segmented into demand and supply. The demand pact kept track of distribution planning while the supply side was responsible for procurment and manufacturing. The entire project was completed in 14 weeks. The system was developed using three elements. The first was to use features of SAP's standard materials management and plant maintenance modules. Second was ABAP, which is a proprietary language for developing on SAP. Third was the creation of a customized database table to the existing database. Despite all these changes, the existing hardware used in the setup was not altered. There were no costs other than manpower for, as it didn't require any change of hardware, and programming was done in SAP's own proprietary language. It did however lead to better system efficiency, helping Titan cut down on their inventory costs and even reduce the manpower. The planning time was reduced at shop levels. It helped release the material into production based on capacity of bottleneck resources.

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