D.S.Constructions to Deploy SAP

October 1, 2007

D.S.Constructions, a part of the D S Group, through its innovative and selective strategy has established itself in the infrastructure development sector. The company is a pioneer in BOT infrastructure development and engineering with projects under execution in the highways, expressways and railway, and hydro power. It’s now pursuing privatization of airports and ultra mega power projects, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), etc., in a short span of 5 years.

The company growing at a fast rate felt that it would be possible to keep pace with growth only with the introduction and use of good IT tools. The technology selection parameters of D.S.Constructions are investment protection, past history, future roadmap, and support.

“We’re little late in IT deployment, however, we’re now doing overtime to catch up. As a first step, we’ve started our SAP implementation for ERP along with creating a good IT infrastructure,” stated C.R.Narayanan, vice president (IT) of D.S.Constructions.

Commenting on the deployment, he further added, “We evaluated various vendors like SISL and Wipro before zeroing in on SAP. IBM is our implementation partner for this. The deployment starts on October 3, 2007. In addition, for our WAN bandwidth, TULIP IT is our partner and for WAN equipments, Fortinet is partnering us.”

The company is taking all measures beforehand so that it doesn’t land into any problems later on. “There aren’t many IT deployments in infrastructure development phase in India. We need to suitably modify the global best practices to the Indian environment,” said Narayanan.

With businesses spread across, the centralized system would help the company in gathering data and will also enable it to connect anytime, anywhere, thereby helping it to determine the status of materials at the various project sites. The cycle time would be reduced and the implementation would determine availability of information, alerts, and knowledge repository.

The company predominantly deploys packaged applications and only for very specific applications it develops bolt ons.

D.S.Constructions believes that HR and IT work very close. “A HR portal is under deployment which would address induction, appraisal, helpdesk, MIS, and staffing. This is a hosted solution, which is from HR Mantra of Mumbai. The deployment will start in 15 days from now,” said Narayanan.

Spending around 2-3% of its revenue, the IT expenditure estimated by the company for this year is about Rs.4 crores. With the growth of its business in the coming years, it expects this expenditure to grow further.

The company has presently taken a pilot project of SAP implementation, which is expected to go on till end of 2008. Hence, all other extended IT iniatives of ERP would be considered for deployment by mid-June or -July, 2009.