United Breweries to implement ERP

United Breweries (UB) group has decided to double its IT expenditure, the
reason being implementation of ERP. The company is planning to implement an ERP
system by April this year though the vendor has not been finalized as yet.

Breweries division controller-IT S Ramakrishnan said, "We are in the
process of identifying the right ERP system. Currently it is under
evaluation."

Most of the company’s activities are outsourced; prominent among them is
facility management and core software development. The company currently has
nine factories, 15 contract factories, 30 depots and sales offices, and all are
connected through WLAN. It intends to cut down cost on various in-house
functions and has decided to implement ERP.

The company had invested around Rs 3 crore in various IT implementations and
has plans to double it this year. The company is also evaluating to deploy Linux
on proxy servers and is planning to introduce mobile applications to enhance
productivity.

UB had done some major IT implementations last year, prominent among them was
development of number of portals for employees that include employee
self-service portal, sales promotion portal and knowledge based

portal.

Some other applications implemented are data warehousing and tracking of
retail sales through SMS. The portals were basically designed to enhance
employee productivity and making office paperless.

Rahul Gupta

Mumbai (CyberMedia News)