Targeting growth opportunities
In India, critical infrastructure projects such as road-and bridge-building continue to bea key enabler of the country’s fast paced development, creating multi-million-dollar opportunities for engineering and construction businesses.
As India’s economy has taken off, Dilip Buildcon has grown rapidly along with it, and the company employs more than 35,000 people and works on over 40 projects per year. To continue its fast-paced expansion, Dilip Buildcon aims to increase the number of major infrastructure projects it takes on each year.
Devendra Goyal, General Manager at Dilip Buildcon Limited, elaborates: “There is a huge focus on infrastructure projects in India, and investing in this area presents challenges as well as opportunities. Our costs, such as raw materials, power and fuel, often total as much as 50% of our annual revenue.
“Because our working capital requirements are so high, effective control over our spending is crucial, particularly as we aim to work on many more large-scale projects in parallel.” In the past, Dilip Buildcon relied on manual, decentralized processes to drive its operations across India.
With more than 65 sites and thousands of employees, this approach was making it difficult to gain a single, accurate view of assets, liabilities and capital across the business, increasing the company’s exposure to liquidity risks.
Making cost-effective procurement decisions also presented significant challenges. Because the company lacked deep visibility into its supplier relationships, it was unable to ensure a consistent and cost-efficient approach to negotiating contracts and purchasing materials.
Without insight into where raw materials were across the business, there was also no way to identify opportunities to move unused inventory to close gaps in other parts of the organization. Devendra Goyal continues: “Without strong business controls in place, it was clear that continuing to scale our business would introduce significant risks. To solve the challenges, we set out to build standardized, integrated business processes.”
Driving a digital transformation
To support the target way of working, Dilip Buildcon selected SAP S/4HANA—an intelligent, automated ERP platform.
With applications for business intelligence, finance and controlling, human resources, material management and more, the SAP S/4HANA solution enables Dilip Buildcon to manage its business processes from end-to-end on a single, best-of-breed platform.
Combined with the SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence Suite, the solution offers accurate, timely operational insights at the touch of a button. Sandeep Pote, Head of IT at Dilip Buildcon Limited, recalls: “We chose SAP S/4HANA because it is designed to harness big data.“
We knew that the ability to access—and act on—reliable information quickly would be essential to manage our risk as we took on a growing number of capital-intensive projects. With SAP S/4HANA, we can achieve exactly that.
To avoid the need for significant up-front capital investments in IT infrastructure, Dilip Buildcon decided to deploy Applications Management for SAP Solutions on IBM Cloud, a fully managed solution from Kyndryl. Additionally, this approach would reduce the need for the company to assemble a large infrastructure team, and instead focus resources on value-added tasks.
Creating new workflows
To design its digital business processes and configure its SAP applications to support the new workflows, Dilip Buildcon engaged a team from Kyndryl. By adopting the Kyndryl Ascend methodology for SAP application development, the Kyndryl team helped Dilip Buildcon to steer its digital transformation project through successive stages of design, development, testing and validation.
Powered by best-practice engineering principles such as Design Thinking, Agile and DevOps, the SAP Application Development methodology enabled Kyndryl to accelerate key deliverables for Dilip Buildcon, including SAP management dashboards, by up to 50%. Following a big-bang go-live, Dilip Buildcon launched its SAP S/4HANA solution to more than 35,000 employees—one of the largest deployments of SAP solutions in India.
“Throughout the deployment process, we were very impressed by the breadth and depth of the [Kyndryl] team’s experience and industry expertise,” comments Sandeep Pote. “Our SAP S/4HANA deployment was complex, and required significant customization, but [Kyndryl] helped us navigate each stage of the project effectively. We were particularly impressed by the [Kyndryl] team’s competencies in the areas of change management and knowledge-transfer, which were extremely important for a digital transformation project of this scale.”
Devendra Jain Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer at Dilip Buildcon Limited, adds: “I am glad to have taken the decision to undertake our business transformation starting with the SAP S/4HANA journey, about two and a half years back.
Ever since then, [Kyndryl] has been a trusted partner for us. By providing the relevant industry and technical expertise at all critical stages of the project, and by working closely with all Dilip Buildcon stakeholders, [Kyndryl] ensured that we were executing this journey together.
“Ours is one of the largest deployments in our Industry in India. To me, the functions that have made the best use of this solution are Asset Management, Fuel & Procurement and Project Management—especially in contracts and billing, human resources and production.
Dashboards in the solution will help me personally to make decisions. It gives me satisfaction and pride to have realized our dream of bringing technology into what we do best, and also to have partnered with the best global players—[Kyndryl] and SAP—in this area too, like the rest of our business.”
Laying a foundation for growth
Since embracing integrated business processes, driven by SAP S/4HANA in the IBM Cloud, Dilip Buildcon has gained unprecedented visibility into its operations across India. Equipped with these insights, the company is revealing opportunities to improve its cost-effectiveness—reducing the business risk of its fast-paced growth.“
SAP S/4HANA has already helped us drive fundamental changes to the way we work,” explains Devendra Goyal.
“Because we now have an accurate, timely view of our assets and inventory, we can forecast our requirements for spare parts and raw materials with a higher degree of accuracy, and maintain optimal inventory levels in each part of the organization. Improved forecasting has helped reduce our working capital requirements by 5%, which will enable us to invest in additional infrastructure projects.”
Karan Suryavanshi, Head of Business Development at Dilip Buildcon, comments: “We started the journey with [Kyndryl] and SAP, and while we knew it would be a challenging journey, the kind of value that has been added has been immense. “We now have more streamlined operations and enhanced visibility into the operations at an activity level. For an organization like ours, this is critical since it helps us expand and scale much faster. Our people are now more confident of achieving their goals.
“SAP S/4HANA was the sole product we had in mind while we started, and our faith in the solution has now been fully justified. [Kyndryl] has been a trusted advisor and has worked very closely with everyone in the organization to make this a success.
“We intend to continue the journey and expect that the value created will be further enhanced.” Devendra Goyal concludes: “National infrastructure projects are one of the driving forces of India’s economic success. The operational efficiencies we’ve achieved with our [Kyndryl] and SAP solutions are enabling us take on more construction projects than ever—ensuring we continue to play an important role in the future of the country.”
October 2021
