Customer Solution Case Study
Real Estate Company Improves Sales Management and Finance Sales
Overview
Country or Region: India
Industry: Real Estate
Customer Profile
Bengal Shrachi Housing Development is a part of the West Bengal based Shrachi Group of companies. The company currently has 50 employees and sales revenues of U.S.$ 22.23 million (INR 100 crore).
Business Situation
The company had disparate systems for each department that did not talk to each other. Ranging from Oracle based finance and payroll solution to a Microsoft® Access based vendor management solution.
Solution
The company with the help of Microsoft Certified Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers decided to implement Microsoft® Business Solutions – Navision® as the business application across the company,
Benefits
n Streamlines and integrates business operations
n Saves time on day-to-day activities
n Reports available at any time
n Employees able to manage six projects simultaneously
n Easy to customize and implement / “With the earlier set of applications, our employees were barely coping with two projects. Today, the same set of people is able to handle six projects simultaneously!”
S. Chakravarty, Vice President, Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited
Bengal Shrachi Housing Development is involved in infrastructure development, urban housing and shopping mall projects in the states of West Bengal and Orissa in India. The company wanted to use its core staff to manage a larger number of projects by automating some of the time-consuming, repetitive and semi-manual process. This would allow it to take part in the real estate boom while lowering overhead costs at the same time.
The company decided to customise and implement Microsoft® Business Solutions – Navision® to streamline and integrate its business processes.
The company has been able to save time and money and automated mundane say-to-day tasks so that its workforce can be more productive.
Situation
Shrachi group was started by entrepreneur S.K. TODI in 2000. Initially the company’s business focused on aluminium rolling mills, utensils, enamelware, ceramics and hospital supplies. Today, the group is involved in businesses as diverse as agro-machinery, engineering, real estate, information technology and medical services.
Real Estate development is one of the main activities of the Shrachi Group in Kolkata. The Shrachi Group decided to produce a long-term answer to the deeply felt need for housing in the state of West Bengal. Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited (Bengal Shrachi) began operations in 2001 with Greenwood Park, a housing project in Calcutta. Other key projects are Greenwood Park Extension, Greenwood Nook, Greenwood Sonata.
The real estate market has been growing rapidly for the last eighteen months across the country and analysts predict the boom to continue for the next two years in the minimum. To take advantage of this in the real estate market, Shrachi Housing Development wanted to increase the number of projects at hand at any given point in time.
To take advantage of the market conditions, Bengal Shrachi had to make some changes internally. Its disparate solutions were causing unnecessary delays and required data to be re-entered multiple times into different applications.
Then to get reports that combined information from different solutions was the other bottleneck. Each time, the IT department would have to get involved, spending time on creating reports instead of managing the infrastructure.
This was not all, the accounts team would be flooded with requests to raise invoices and provide details on collections when the payments were due on a particular project. The team would spend long days at work because the process was semi-manual and required each invoice to be raised manually.
To ease the burden and spread the workload more evenly across the team, it was felt that the company must invest in a business application that would automate, streamline and integrate various business functions.
Solution
Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited (Bengal Shrachi) began looking out for a partner. Their key criterion was to choose a partner who could also bring in industry best practices. Microsoft Certified Business Solutions Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was the ideal choice because of its consulting background. “We were keen to work with a large firm that would not only implement the solution for us but also help us implement industry best practices as an integral part of implementation,” explains Anand Agrawal, Assistant General Manager (Accounts), Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited.
PwC recommended Microsoft® Business Solutions – Navision® as it felt the solution could be implemented fast, customized to meet the real estate company’s business processes as well as provide an integrated business application encompassing all business functions.
In the first phase, PwC implemented purchase and payables, sales and receivables, inventory and basic general ledger. It also implemented Navision Jobs which was customized to manage projects track budgets, tenders, bill of quantity (Estimate for project in terms of work scope), scope of work and contracts. In addition, Bengal Shrachi required a version control to be implemented – To have a complete trail of the change in budget as history so that Bengal Shrachi would be able to harness the experience gained in budgetary revisions done earlier.
Another key customization was made to the Purchase and Payables module. It was customized into a work order that would track the budget for each line item in the contract with a vendor. It would capture the architectural details of the project was made into the key interface between the sales and project teams. PwC created a maser for which included price charts and mechanism to track the project status.
A customer booking functionality was developed which books the sale of a unit (Apartment / shop / any other saleable unit) and also generates the payment schedule for the customer. The system subsequently generates invoices in bulk for all customers whose payment milestone is achieved. The individual customer receipts can be tracked in the Customer Booking.
The implementation and customization took four months. The first phase of the implementation went live in November 2004 with five concurrent users. The second phase included implementation of the financials and went live in April 2005.
Reporting was another key highlight of the project, which has been integrated with Microsoft Office 2000. The standard reports are generated as defined by the organization. These can be viewed as pdf files, or imported in Microsoft Office Excel 2000 for further analysis. The system administrator can build custom reports. Depending on complexity, a new report can be created in just two man days.
Benefits
While the project has been live for only few months, the Bengal Shrachi perceives significant benefits. From centralized data entry, timely reporting, better management of resources, the company feel far more organized.
Streamlines and integrates business operations
The key improvement has been in the area of integrating and streamlining of business processes. Earlier, each application for each department needed the data to be re-entered. Some information that was required by purchase, accounts, marketing and finance would be entered as many as three times in different applications. “Today, with Microsoft Navision, the data is entered once into the master and all departments access the same information. This removes unnecessary delays, duplication of effort and errors due to human intervention,” explains Rahul Todi, Managing Director, Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited.
Saves time on day-to-day activities
In the earlier systems up t four people would perform the same activity in different departments. With the implementation of a central business solution the company has been able to rationalize manpower. For example it uses one person for data entry and some supervision time. The rest of the employees have been re-utilized under other functions.
Reports available at any time
The reporting process was key area of concern as it would take days to create the reports. While its too early to comment on the month-by-month improvement on the cash flow situation, there is a perception within the management that tracking the payments and follow-ups have significantly improved, as the information is available to all the relevant teams.
Employees able to manage six projects simultaneously
The perception within the organization is of being more organized and less chaos. “With the earlier set of applications, our employees were barely coping with two projects. Today, the same set of people is able to handle six projects simultaneously!” comments S. Chakravarty, Vice President, Bengal Shrachi Housing Development Limited.
This is because, the company has been able to adopt best practices and spread the workload. For example, the accounts team was responsible for generating all the invoices and receipts in the earlier solution. With Microsoft Navision, these functions can be done at the click of a button by the sales team as well, rationalizing the workload.
Easy to customize and implement
The solution has been customized to close to 25 percent to meet the needs specific to the real estate industry. Only with Navision could the implementation be completed within four months, as the solution offers tools and utilities that allow quick customization.
About PricewaterhouseCoopers
PricewaterhouseCoopers (www.pwc.com) is the largest multi-competency firm (Revenues of USD 15 Billion) in the world with a reputation for providing high quality service to clients. As part of the global network of PricewaterhouseCoopers, PwC India has access to global best practices and methodologies and can easily tap the experience of PwC personnel worldwide through its advanced communication network. This also allows PwC to combine global know-how with local expertise in carrying out consultancy assignments in India.
PwC India is one of the largest solution providers for Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) in the Indian subcontinent. PwC brings to the table considerable know-how in the domains of strategic change, process improvement and technology solutions. We have an unmatched track record in India of delivering holistic business solutions to clients by leveraging our expertise in ERP implementations and complementary applications, Process Improvement and Change Management.
Microsoft Business Solutions
Microsoft Business Solutions offer integrated business applications and services that allow small and midsize organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers for improved efficiency. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with other Microsoft software, including the Microsoft Office System and the Windows operating system, to streamline processes across an entire organization. This gives businesses insight to respond rapidly, plan strategically, and execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions are delivered through a worldwide network of channel partners that provide specialized services and local support tailored to a company’s needs.
For more information about Microsoft Business Solutions, go to:
www.microsoft.com/businesssolutions