Leading corrugated packaging manufacturer Trusts Ramco ERP

About the Company

“Vision is what separates one company from another, just as it separates one person from another. But as important as vision is the ability to execute, the belief in attention to detail.”  This meticulous approach has been the mantra of success for the Bengaluru-based corrugated packaging manufacturer.

The company is a premier supplier of the custom made corrugated packaging. Established in 1975, the company has risen to be the leading corrugated packaging company in South India with an impressive annual turnover and conversion of nearly 3000 metric tons of craft paper. Among the larger manufacturers of containerboard and corrugated packaging products in South India, it is a key player in the packaging industry. The company’s focus on a single line of business differentiates it from its major competitors, and has helped it to develop a level of operational excellence and quality that is well-recognized in the industrial community.

The company manufactures a broad range of corrugated packaging products, including conventional shipping containers used to protect and transport manufactured goods, multi-color boxes and displays with strong visual appeal used to merchandise products in retail locations, and special design/application boxes used in the pharmaceutical, FMCG and food industry. The company can also produce flexographic printed packaging; die cut, laminated and glued structures. The company has over 25,000 square feet of well laid out manufacturing space, which houses contemporary corrugated converting equipment.

When Business Process Automation became A necessity!

The company lays a lot of emphasis on creating quality rich packaging solutions via dynamic and customer focused operating principles. For achieving this goal, the company continuously invests in the latest technology at all levels of its manufacturing processes.

However, as the business volume increased, the company found itself floundering on the transaction management and operations’ front as there was no integrated solution that would put all processes and resources on to one structured framework. The challenges were far too many, and varied in nature. The company lacked standardized coding of raw material attributes and inventory. For example, the paper used had several parameters like grams per square meter (GSM)/Mill/Size/Burst Factor (BF), which would determine their usage as per the customer requirements. A system was required that would capture these attributes for different items in the master database. Also, the fact that the company had not been maintaining any item codes meant that each item was required to be coded. This was a hectic task.

Therefore, the management wanted a solution that could standardize its processes and management functions and provide a unified view of the organization. Another major challenge related to the company’s workforce, which in majority was an elderly lot.

Most of them were a bit reluctant to undergo a transition as conspicuous as this. Hence, a lot of convincing and training was required to generate a buy-in for ERP. It was indeed a hard call taken by the management to go ahead with the implementation, despite the apparent roadblocks, which they knew would impede the way.

An initiative Driven from the Top

When the company decided to go ahead with automation of its processes, the search for a cost-effective and efficient ERP system began.

Several ERP vendors, including Ramco Systems, were evaluated. During the process of evaluation, the company found that Ramco OnDemand ERP (RODE) was far ahead in all evaluation parameters, when compared to other ERPs in terms of meeting its business requirements. RODE seemed to them like an ideal fit to our requirements, mainly because the SaaS model made deploying ERP an affordable proposition.

The modules the company implemented include, General Ledger, Discrete Production, Inventory, Management Accounting, MIS and related reporting, Payable and Receivable Management, Purchase and Subcontracting, and Sales and Shipping.

Often in large organizations, there is a well-defined organization hierarchy and several professionals, who can take the onus and steer forward, effectively, an initiative as elaborate and daunting as an ERP implementation; where not only the organization processes but also the workforce has to undergo a 360 degree transformation.

However, in most small and mid-sized organizations, a well-defined hierarchy is missing. So it becomes crucial that members of the top management personally monitor and oversee the pre- and post-implementation processes. Realizing this, the management steered the ERP implementation from the top and went an extra mile to convince employees to adapt to the new set up. The employee training part was challenging and was handled well by the Ramco implementation team.

While it seemed difficult at the outset to move from disparate processes and legacy systems to a sophisticated and structured ERP framework, the company has steered through the transition, successfully—mostly because of the sheer commitment of the top management and cooperation received from the side of Ramco’s implementation team. What’s more, moving to the cloud is helping them move closer to its goal of emerging as a leader and be amongst the top ten national players.