"Fosters! Australian for beer". The slogan might have caught on in India in a big way, but unknown to many, behind this immense brand building campaign has been operations controlled by one key element, IT. Thanks to this intensive use of IT the company has witnessed phenomenal success and has created a name for itself in the valley of brew.

Aurangabad-based Fosters India, a subsidiary of the 2.5 billion Australian based Fosters Group sells its products through a network of 25 distributors in the territories of Maharashtra, Goa and Daman. In a matter of 22 months since commencement of operations, the company has manufactured and sold 35 million bottles of beer. This might seem to be some achievement, but there are certain elements in the production process which need to be looked after.

Typically to the beer industry, Fosters packaging process is an elaborate exercise involving handling of bottles, label, foils, and crates, gobbling up precious financial resources. As the packaging process (bottles, labels, foils) constitutes a large part of the manufacturing costs, the key challenge for Fosters was to control the the cost of the expensive packaging process. The company wanted to track the production and rejection rates through and enterprise solution. Says Sunil Deshmukh, Financial controller and Company Secretary, Fosters India. "Typically in our operation; we have four stages i.e. bottle washing, filling, pasteurization and labeling ending with the final packing. As Fosters uses only new bottles in its operations (compared to others who reuse bottles), the cost incurred in bottle breakage on the line was significant. Today due to the ERP solution, we can identify the rejections in each stage and take corrective action."

Fosters also needed a high degree of integration, across all departments like stores, quality control, production, and accounting. Fosters needed an integrated information system which support the entire billing system and also support its varied and frequent reporting requirements. Fosters has stingent reporting requirements to the country management and to the group head quarters in Australia and in order to confirm to the norms a structural report was possible only if the information was generated in that way.

Fosters decided to implement the information system in phases commensurate with the construction of the Aurangabad manufacturing facility. Fosters chose MFG/PRO from QAD as the ERP solution with Thirdware Solution as implementation partners. Says Pradeep Erinjery CEO Thirdware Solution, "MFG/PRO was chosen as the solution since MFG/PRO has strong industry specific functionality for the food and beverage industry. Also compared to other ERP solutions the implementation time for MFG/PRO is short and can be deployed rapidly in a period of 4-6 months." Thirdware was chosen as the implementation partners since the company had strong domain knowledge about the food and brewery industry and has already worked with the likes of Bacardi, Kissan and Godrej foods. The solution is deployed on a Unix environment with Progress as the database. These come bundled in with MFG/PRO. Fosters has spent a cool Rs 70 lakh.for the ERP implementation, which includes both the cost of software as well as hardware.

Accordingly business processors were mapped and information relating to production accounting and cost accounting were captured. Three months after the ERP solution was deployed, Fosters began to derive the benefits that only an integrated system could provide. Post implementation, the management found that MFG/PRO was a key contributor to the company's increased productivity and cost control activities.

The second important benefit for Fosters arising out of the use of MFG/PRO was in procurement of raw materials from different suppliers. Thanks to MFG/PRO, Fosters managed to compare the landed costs of all suppliers in a jiffy and select the supplier on the cost and delivery time matrix. The task was compounded by the fact that suppliers hail from different states leading to sales tax complexities. MFG/PRO factors such intricate issues thus enabling the company to get a fair comparison. The benefits don't stop here. Tracking supplier performance on a regular basis has become a child's play now. Says Vilas Kanyal, Head Business Development, Thirdware, "As the ERP solution integrates costs and financial accounting charting various inputs costs from the past and forecasting future trends makes the job easier. Without the solution this could be done only at the end of the year." Today the ERP solution manages the entire business cycle starting from receipt of sales order, to production, procurement and dispatch. Adds Deshmukh, "In the absence of the ERP solution, closing of our accounts would take more than 20 days, but now we can do the same in less than seven days."

Today the data pertaining to the distribution chain - consisting of dispatch of beers cases to the 25 distributors, is captured in the system. As the distributors, on their part sell to dealers and retailers, Fosters is looking at capturing data from these sources as well.

Deshmukh says "We are currently the only firm in India having the e-enabled version of MFG/PRO version 9. Though the system is in place to go in for B2B or B2C transaction , we are currently adopting a wait and watch attitude primarily because of the insignificant number of B2B and B2C transactions in the Indian scenario."