About Origin International

World-wide, Original International (part of the Philips group of the Netherlands, and a leading IT services – software and systems solutions – provider with extensive experience in SAP R/3) deals in transformation consulting, desktop solutions, ERP solutions, business applications solutions, euro and millennium services, technical automation, operational infrastructure solutions, e-commerce, re-engineering, reverse engineering, conversions, migration, strategic technologies and technical infrastructure services.

Origin's key areas of focus are oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and hi-technology and automobile industry segments -- with major clients like ICI, Shell, Aramco, Phillip Morris and over 400 other SAP installations in over 40 countries, banking on the strength of its 2000-plus SAP consultants. It is thus able to have global scale operations along with strong local support in these countries.      

Origin Information Technology (India) Limited is the Indian arm of this global IT services provider company. This company is concentrating its activities in the pharmaceuticals, chemicals and oil and gas sectors. It is planning to give greater thrust to its efforts in the engineering, power and construction sectors. About 60 per cent of its activities is based on SAP implementation and licensing. The company is also involved in systems integration, software development and consultancy.

Origin's Indian subsidiary is an ISO 9001 company and has positioned itself as a major SAP implementor and ABAP service provider. It serves the local and the global market on the strength of its ABAP factory in Mumbai. (ABAP is the programming environment in which SAP has been developed. Programming in ABAP helps customise client requirements.).

Origin has some of its major projects in the US and Middle East while it is developing its roots in India.

Origin does customised implementation for large companies with complex processes, which cannot be dealt with by generalised solutions. The company has developed pre-configured solutions for its SAP implementation to reduce project time. These are industry-specifc solutions based on 'hot buttons' for an industry to address its own particular requirements and practices. For example, shelf life, co-products, by-products, in the case of pharmaceuticals industry.

The company has also developed solutions, named CORE, for small and medium enterprise, which cannot afford custom-made ERP solutions. CORE incorporates best business processes and comes pre-configured for individual business processes.

Talking to domain-B, L S Ganesan, general manager, SAP practice, Origin Information Technology (India) Ltd, said, "For very large companies SAP solutions need to be customised, but then to speed up implementation you need accelerators like ASAP.

"For small and medium enterprises, CORE is an ideal platform to adopt SAP and acquire best business practises. It's faster and cost effective. Anyway, there is no point in customising usual procedures like general ledger, accounts, etc."

According to Ganesan, "it is not just the major companies that are implementing ERP". He says ERP has gone beyond the "why ERP?" stage and is now "in a tornado phase".

"Very soon competitive advantage will have to come from extending ERP to supply chain management, customer relations management  and strategic enterprise management". The first two of these relate to customer and supplier demands and needs, sales, products, customers; they help extend the enterprise's reach beyond the base level of the ERP.

The third is what the company has done to take ERP solutions beyond mere implementation. It has introduced the concept of management cockpit. The management cockpit uses existing data from the SAP database to identify key factors, look at key performance indicators and compare them against standards.

Origin's major clients in India include Reliance, Eicher, Telco and Procter & Gamble.