Section 12.3. ESA in action: Asian Paints

12.3. ESA in action: Asian Paints

Composite applications are playing an important role in companies' transformation efforts. This is certainly the case at Asian Paints, where the internal transformation strategy focuses on the creation of composites.

Asian Paints is India's largest paint manufacturer and is among the top 10 decorative coatings companies in the world, with annual revenues approaching $600 million. The company serves more than 30,000 customers in 65 countries in Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Africa. With a supply chain that includes 29 production plants located in 23 countries and a handful of global subsidiaries, Asian Paints has invested heavily in IT in recent years to automate its most important business processes, including manufacturing, distribution, and inventory control.

In 2000, the company began to migrate its core custom-developed legacy systems to the prepackaged Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other enterprise applications contained in the mySAP Business Suite. Asian Paints also adopted SAP NetWeaver as its toolkit for integration, as well as the platform for its next generation of enterprise services. With the migration nearing completion, the company has begun drafting the blueprint for the companywide strategic adoption of ESA. Its goals revolve around both internal and external integrations. Internally, the company intends to connect its new enterprise applications with its existing supply chain, R&D systems, and portal interfaces to support the development of new composite applications. Externally, Asian Paints hopes to connect the internal systems of its supply-chain partners to its own and thus optimize the flow of data and business processes up and down the chain.

Asian Paints currently exchanges data with partners via XML messages, but the relative absence of business semantics and standards at both ends forces both companies to transform the data to match their own systems. In an enterprise-services-enabled environment, Asian Paints envisions a scenario in which data is automatically passed back and forth and is reconciled to each system, instead of simply pushed by the company to its suppliers. It is hoped that this approach will lower the cost and time involved to bring on new suppliers and improve the capabilities of current interactions.

To get there, Asian Paints intends to deploy several components of SAP NetWeaver, including Integration Broker and Business Process Management from SAP NetWeaver XI, over the next 18 months. With those serving as the foundation, the company plans to begin building composite applications aimed at streamlining partner interactions (e.g., stock supplying and customer ordering), automating compliance, and supporting its painting services business over the next three to four years.

The company expects its biggest challenge to be encouraging its partners to adopt their own enterprise services over the same span to maximize the level of integration with Asian Paints's infrastructure.