Atul Increases Savings, Revenue and Productivity with Tech Changes

Sunil Lalbhai, chairman of Atul Ltd. since 2007, was recently named one of the top 100 CEOs in India by BT (News - Alert)-PWC India. He leads an expansive company. For instance, Atul has put together its products into 41 product groups. Atul offers chemical and manufacturing solutions for the agriculture, auto, construction, cosmetic, food and beverage, fragrance, marine, packaging, paper, pharmaceutical and textile fields. Atul has seven verticals which include aromatics, bulk chemicals and intermediates, colors, crop protection, floras, pharmaceuticals and intermediates, and polymers.

Given its size and complexity, Atul needs to have streamlined operations in finance, inventory manufacturing, logistics, marketing, sales, and supply chain. That means technology becomes very important.

When it comes to computing, Atul was using Oracle (News - Alert) e-Business Suite version 12.1.3 and PeopleSoft 9.1. Business volume increased and users faced slower online transaction processing (OLTP) and report processing times. The delays were most prevalent at the end of the month – when reports were produced.

In response, the internal IT department was able to segregate transactional processing and the reporting framework of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. They set up a zero-cost, open-source-based data warehouse on Pentaho Data Integration, Kettle Spoon (Pentaho Data Integration Community Edition). Extract, transform, load (ETL) was integrated with the Oracle database operating with Oracle eBusiness Suite and PeopleSoft. And Atul implemented a QlikView business intelligence (BI) dashboard. Data was retrieved from the data warehouse instead of the production database. As a result there were lower maintenance and implementation costs. The use of open source options lowered the total cost of ownership (TCO) in connection with data warehouse license costs. There was a fast rollout of a data warehouse solution in a period of just 3.5 months – which led to savings, too. Raw material procurement prices were lowered, as well, and savings were realized from changed procurement.

“Through a constant online performance measurement of production, marketing, purchase, stores and finance teams, Atul has been able to demonstrate continuous improvement of decision-making capabilities to increase revenues and reduce costs,” according to a report from Information Week India.

This savings is part of a wider commitment to productivity, efficiency and teamwork – seen at the company.

“I wish to say in all humility that the steady improvement in the economic-environmental-social performance of Atul over time is because of the hard work and perseverance by every member of Atul family, and I consider it a privilege to be a part and a representative of the team. I am confident that collectively we will realize the enormous potential of Atul that individually we may never be able to achieve, and we will make this happen by bringing out the best in us,” Lalbhai said in a recent statement.