How an industry leader in electrical and digital building infrastructure transformed into a customer-centric organization by upgrading to Infor XA with Birlasoft.
The client is an industry leader in electrical and digital building infrastructures with a global presence. The solutions the company offers are used in both residential and non-residential buildings, as well as data centres and other industrial spaces.
Its technological expertise, its international presence, the power of its brands, and the sheer scope of its offerings have made the client a global pace-setter. It has business in 90 countries, employs a workforce going beyond 36,000, and reported total sales north of €6 billion in 2020.
Now, the company is embracing the shift to digital technologies and working towards reducing its carbon footprint by developing new products for photovoltaic installations and lighting control.
The Challenge
Of late, the client admitted to dealing with business-critical applications that were complex and required a specific skill set to be handled. Since their in-house teams were ill-equipped and had limited access to the required expertise, the company had a tough time managing mission-critical applications.
In a scenario such as this, the management found it difficult to optimize their operations and provide support while dealing with and maintaining multiple contractors. Subsequently, the end-user support the company provided for all level 1, 2, and 3 tickets took longer than necessary, and this resulted in delays in the integration of orders, delivery of goods, status updates, and compliance with local legal matters.
Business Needs
With an in-house team that needed support in handling its projects, the only practical recourse for the client was to resolve issues with their mission-critical applications was to look for a fitting partner for outsourcing. This was all the more needed as finding ways to save costs and dealing with persisting issues was actively pushing the company’s core vision and products to the back burner.
Secondly, the client lacked resources for handling IBM AS/400 and Infor's XA ERP software application, which posed a major roadblock for their day-to-day business activities.
The company needed to fulfil its end-user support commitments while aiming for an excellent customer support experience. This meant reducing their downtime and installing regular upgrades. These upgrades were necessary not only for customer service purposes but also to reduce the turnaround time for enhancements to meet project timelines and business needs in general. It was also important to upgrade to the latest release as product support was nearing its end and the hardware & OS versions were outdated.
The client’s management team also needed to automate the company’s processes and operations to improve their manual productivity levels and make the rule-based, algorithmic processes free of errors. The idea was to free their workers for more cognitive tasks and at the same time save the company on operating costs to a substantial degree.
And lastly, the client counted on solutions to be implemented across entities and specific projects and build composite integrated applications.
The Solution
Birlasoft has had a long-standing relationship with the client, dating back to 2005. As a result, we provided the necessary services for establishing an Offshore Development Center (ODC) for the company to manage the Infor XA ERP-based group solution. This solution was to be integrated with various applications core to its business, including but not limited to eCom, BI, Manugistics, Salesforce CRM, WMS, and JDA, and everything was to function from a single ODC. The following were the various elements that were offered as part of the ODC solution:
- Experienced and highly skilled consultants to help with AS/400, XA, Oracle, MS SQL, MS BI, Power BI, Salesforce, DBA, and Infra. Other experts who could support integrations tools like BizTalk, Mulesoft, and Talend were also employed.
- Managing L1, L2, and L3 support for 16x5 Office support and 24x7 telephonic support for improved customer satisfaction.
- Developing applications, performing maintenance, and end-to-end testing.
- Providing UAT support, configuration management, deployments, and upgrades to suit the business needs and cater to the mission-critical applications.
- Implementing group solutions in the company’s new subsidiaries, managing various projects, taking audits, and training users. This was a necessary step to maintain certain customer satisfaction levels across all the provided services.
- Developing and maintaining interfaces with XA and its third-party add-on applications.
- Upgrading to the latest XA solution portfolio, including an OS upgrade and migration programs designed to reduce the standing downtimes and improve the overall performance across the whole spectrum.
The Impact
Birlasoft’s transformational partnership with the client led to numerous positive reinforcements in the company. For instance, the solutions we provided helped in materializing one of its goals to become a customer-centric organization and optimize its resources to improve its productivity levels and stay ahead of the competition in general.
In figures, the company needed to provide 24x7 support for critical applications, and we delivered, which led to a 10% reduction in baselined ticket volume YoY against an erstwhile 7%. In addition, our solution fortified their regular operations and led to a continuous reduction in incidents which directly reduced the maintenance costs, other indirect business impacts, and management of compliance and security-related issues and risks.
With the Infor XA upgrade, the company witnessed a drastic improvement in its operational methodology mainly due to reduced manual efforts. Automation, too, played a major role in taking over redundant rule-based tasks and help in making accurate forecasts related to the inventory and services to the customers.
The group solution offered by Birlasoft panned out for the client’s subsidiaries across 28 countries and included common reporting, intercompany transaction optimizations, inventory cost management, and better planning across group companies. The same group solution was adopted more than 15 times for both existing and newly acquired subsidiaries.
We have a long-standing relationship with the client as we aim to deliver on continuous transformation and improve their application and technology footprint management levels. We aimed to deliver innovative ideas and leveraged various emerging technologies to deploy their landscape. As a result of our efforts, we now witness global collaboration in their entities that operate as a unified team regardless of geographical boundaries and time zones and support more than 3000 users across 28 countries.
