Tube Investments of India Limited is the flagship Company of the Rs. 15,646 crore Murugappa Group. Tube Products of India (TPI) is the Engineering Division of the Company and manufactures ERW, CDW Tubes and CRCA Strips catering to both the national and international markets. Tube Investments of India envisioned the need of ERP in the year 2000 and one of their Units went live on October 2001 on Oracle E-Business Suite. The Tubes manufacturing division of TPI went live on September 2005. The Strips division of TPI continued to use the Legacy system owing to the complexity of the business requirement and the unavailability of a product fitment from Oracle to meet the same.

Business Requirements

TPI opted to scrap the Legacy system that was built over a period of 40 years and decided to move-over as:

• The current market dynamics warranted for an integrated system with other functions;
• The Legacy system had reached its saturation point long back and no further improvement could be made to suit the current business changes;
• The cost of maintenance of the Legacy had been increasing

Challenges
Strips Division procures HR Steel Coils from reputed suppliers and meets the CRCA Steel requirements of its customers. The process involves the operations like Pickling, Slitting, Cold Rolling, Annealing and Cropping (optional) to convert the HR Coil into a CRCA Coil / Sheets that could meet the customer specifications.

The above process involved complexity wherein a single raw-material gets exploded into multiple sub-assemblies and every sub-assembly thereafter explodes to a single or multiple finished goods. The Bills of Materials and Routings were dynamic involving multiple alternates and changed as per the customer order. However Strips had highly matured and well established processes to meet the customer specifications.

The global Steel prices were fluctuating coupled with shrinkage of the automotive market which was the primary customer market for the Strips division. The ‘mantra’ decided by the top-management was optimization of the already well-established processes at every level. The management at TPI was decisive to leverage the benefits of ERP to tide over the troubled market conditions.

Benefits

The Strips division went live on 1st January 2009 with our solution mapping, meeting the entire manufacturing requirement of the business. The go-live was smooth though it involved change management.

Of all the implementations across Tube Investments of India, the Strips manufacturing implementation is regarded as the smoothest that had met most of the business requirements and is regarded as the benchmark implementation. The management has acknowledged the benefits of the implementation and has instructed the Strips division to share some of the process mapping, practices and reports with the other divisions and units within the group.

To quote an example is the Kardex Report that forms the back-bone of the entire operations at Strips. The report  is a conglomeration of data for an Item-Sales Order combination from demand, supply and planning side with details drilled down to current and past production data, work-in-process, accepted and rejected quantities at every stage of manufacturing. The report that involved high level of manual work during the legacy period could be now be taken in minutes after implementation of ERP. The confidence level could be ascertained from the fact that the report (without any manual supervision) is automatically mailed to Strips divisions’ internal customers so as to facilitate advance planning at the customer end. Strips management team is pondering on the idea of extending this facility to their priority external customers as well.