To make the most of this, engineering, procurement and construction company SIPS sought to build a more integrated and agile enterprise with greater control over costs and with enhanced workforce productivity.

Specifically, the company set out to achieve this by joining up and streamlining multiple processes, enabling it to transform inventory management, take on more projects with the same headcount and maximize profit margins.

This has been a boon for homegrown EPC engineering, procurement and construction specialist companies.

Mayank Jain, Director at SPL, says: “Our vision is to be a leading company in India’s growth in power distribution, engineering and project management. Having personally worked in Oracle corporation and seen the advantages technology can bring, we were ready to work on the challenge to change our working style and culture. The time was right to invest in resolving some internal challenges to put us in the best position for continued growth.”

SIPS recognized that a lack of integration between different parts of the business posed an obstacle to corporate agility, limiting employee productivity and the company’s ability to adapt to change.

Binod Thakur, Director explains: “We realized that until we move to a centralized system that ties up all different activities across our business divisions, we are not operating at our full potential. Our procurement and inventory management, projects planning, site execution, finance and sales and billing departments were all acting individually. We have to help them effectively work together , to enable the management to gain an end-to-end view of performance to keep a pulse of the health of the organization.”

Materials management, which plays a vital role in the company’s everyday operations, was identified as a key area for improvement. Without visibility of inventory, SPL was missing out on valuable chances to optimize use of resources.

Mayank Jain, Director- Procurement, elaborates: “Typically, we work on several projects at the same time across different divisions (Rural electrification, Transmission Lines and Substations), at different stages in an average three-year project duration, each requiring a range of materials. Storing inventory is a critical area and direct cost for us, so we realized that more closely matching materials to project plan will offer major benefits —but this was not possible with our existing excel based approach.”

Binod Thakur explains: “We estimate that the more efficient, flexible ways of working enabled by the Lighthouse and their Oracle based solution will enable us to manage three times the workload with the same headcount. As a result, when new opportunities come our way, we can embrace them with ease and speed.”
Equipped with a comprehensive view of operations, SPL can identify and stop cost leakages, to boost profit margins.

Mayank Jain continues: “We now have a much better understanding of a complex business landscape. For the first time, we can use the Lighthouse ERP solutions to see the different costs for each job at any time, and how they track against the initial budget. Within a few months after adopting our new processes implemented by Lighthouse, we saw cost reductions of approximately six percent.”

With faster access to accurate, up-to-date information, SPL can support improved decision-making. Whereas previously, information was buried in spreadsheets and could take more than a day to extract, it is now available near-instantly.

Mayank Jain concludes: “Working with Lighthouse, we have evolved into a more integrated, agile enterprise that can make better choices based on timely data. Based on our current profit projections, we anticipate that we could raise revenues by as much as 15 percent in the next financial year—something that would not be possible without the valuable competitive advantage offered by the Lighthouse solution and services.”