In Safe Waters

Mazagaon Dock Limited (MDL), is a Public Sector Undertaking, under the administrative control of Department of Defense Production, Ministry of Defense, and Government of India. Some of the major activities of MDL include ship-building (primarily naval warships), submarine construction, ship-repair (naval, para military and merchant ships), and heavy engineering (including fabrication of off-shore jackets).

Business challenges

The organization was facing a number of challenges in its day to day operations. It wanted the core operations of design, planning, production/fabrication, berth, QA, maintenance, and commercials to perform in a seamless manner. Besides, it wanted the total integration to its core operational business processes.

MDL was also looking for seamless work flow capabilities and automation, as there was no seamless work flow in operations. Also, since consistent, accurate and comparable data was not available to the organization, it wanted data streams that will provide the capability for users to look at reliable information. Lastly, the organization wanted to go in for automated budget and planning capabilities, as both the activities were handled manually.

The SAP Solution

Since, the management wanted to bring the IT systems of MDL's operations on SAP platform, it roped in Mahindra Satyam as a system integrator to do so. The solution proposed by Mahindra Satyam was implementation of mySAP ECC 6.0 product along with enterprise portal for HR functionalities and IVL for import and export documentation to meet MDL's requirements.

SAP's product is built with functionalities based on best practices followed. The SAP modules proposed for covering all the functional requirements of MDL included finance, controlling/payroll, human resources and admin/EHS/payroll/transport, plant maintenance, quality management, materials management, purchasing, inventory management, production management, and project management.

“Mahindra Satyam's implementation approach is primarily driven by the need for the timely delivery of an integrated systems solution to enable MDL a cost-effective implementation in a time bound manner,” added Vivek Anant Joshi, Project Manager- ERP, Mazagaon Dock.

According to Joshi, MDL is utilizing TRIBON software V, M2 and M3 for shipbuilding designing purposes and Primavera software for project-planning activities of shipbuilding division. SAP system provided execution and logistic backbone for these design and planning software. Most of the execution and logistic operations were manual or excel based and with the usage of ASAP methodology, these core business processes were brought on SAP platform.

ASAP methodology is phased approach in which all business processes are brought into SAP through business discussions and blue printing, configuration/development, testing, training and cut-over. Collection of integrated data, cleansing, validation and data migration was important activity to build master database for MDL.

“Change management and training is key aspect throughout the implementation cycle and training was carried out at various levels using class room training approach. Usage of training documentation and web-based help helped users achieve required expertise in SAP system,” asserted Joshi.

This is the first biggest implementation in India in the ship building domain in SAP covering every R/3 modules (FICO, SD, MM, PP, PM, QM, PS, ECM, DMS, EHS, BW) and HCM and its sub-modules (OM, PA, TEM, PD, Time, Payroll, RCRT, ESS, MSS and Travel) and enterprise portal for their intranet and ESS/MSS.

SI contribution

The contribution of Mahindra Satyam as a SI in this deployment has been provisioning of SAP software and licenses, implementation of SAP ECC mapping all business functionalities, as many as 1150 business processes were analyzed thoroughly and mapped into SAP, about 400 ABAP developments are made to meet the requirements of MDL and lastly, assisting MDL core team in training nearly 600 end users and 8500 ESS/1500 MSS users.

Mahindra Satyam's implementation approach is primarily driven by the need for the timely delivery of an integrated systems solution to enable MDL a cost-effective implementation in a time bound manner. This was done considering the following aspects:

• Optimizing the implementation period.
• Ensuring availability of the relevant personnel from MDL throughout the engagement period.
• Satyam adopted ASAP methodology for the implementation.
• Implementation was a big-bang approach with all modules going live across the various locations.
• ABAP development was executed onsite.

Mahindra Satyam took 18 months to implement the mySAP ECC 6.0 at MDL. The implementation was carried out from MDL, Mumbai location. Mahindra Satyam has placed its consultants in Mumbai (onsite) and Chennai (offshore) for carrying out this end-to-end implementation. All the modules went live together except payroll which was slated for year-end to go live.

Nivedan Prakash
(nivedanp@cybermedia.co.in)