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REDWOOD SHORES, CA - Lakshmi Machine Works, Ltd. (LMW), one of the world's largest textile spinning machinery manufacturers, has increased revenue by 20 percent in the last year. The Oracle E-Business Suite implementation has helped in this achievement.

Founded in 1962, LMW is one of only three manufacturers worldwide that provides a complete range of textile machinery and boasts 60 percent market share in India. To effectively compete with rising global competition and price pressures, the company needed to implement aggressive cost controls, become more responsive to customer requirements, increase supply chain efficiency and introduce decision-making processes based on business intelligence. After an extensive search for enterprise software that was capable of automating end-to-end business processes including customer relationship management, financials, human resources, product life cycle management and supply chain management, LMW selected Oracle applications.

"LMW has seen tremendous results from our implementation of Oracle," said Sanjay Jayavarthanavelu, wholetime director, LMW. "The automation of processes across financials and improved efficiencies in our manufacturing operations alone helped us to increase revenue and cut costs last year, and the Oracle E-Business Suite holds promise to help us maintain such growth."

Standardizing On Oracle Improves Operations
Marking one of the largest Oracle E-Business Suite deployments, LMW elected a phased implementation and went live on the first phase in 2003, just 10 months after the implementation began. LMW is using Oracle Balanced Scorecard, Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (eAM), Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS), Oracle Manufacturing, Oracle Sales, Oracle Services and Oracle Supply Chain Management. The current implementation of Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Oracle Balanced Scorecard concludes the second phase of deployment. With Oracle E-Business Suite, LMW has been able to:

• Shorten the sales cycle -- LMW equipped its sales people with 360-degree views of its customers and analytical tools, giving them insight into the most profitable deals. With Oracle Sales, the sales force is able to eliminate labor-intensive tasks. In addition, the integrated tools simplify the tracking and management of sales forecasts, leads, opportunities, quoting, configuring, and ordering products -- improving the productivity of the sales team and enabling it to shorten the sales cycle. More than 40 percent of sales options now are forecasted, versus 15 percent previously. In addition, Oracle Planning and Oracle Configurator enable LMW to facilitate an efficient and smother process of configuring a sales order, providing customer bills for each machine and accurate calculation of standard costs and production lead time.

• Empower the workforce -- With Oracle HRMS, LMW has seen substantial cost savings; the HR department now spends only two days a month providing HR information to its employees, compared to six days previously. LMW's global workforce uses Oracle HR Self Service to complete common administrative tasks themselves, such as updating personal information, benefits administration, leave requests, training requests and appraisals. The process of leave encashment alone now only takes one day, versus 15 days previously. By empowering employees to manage their own HR-related information, LMW's HR department can now focus its attention on strategic corporate initiatives and employee growth programs.

• Manage innovation -- Leveraging Oracle PLM applications, LMW is targeting a 15 percent reduction in time to market for new products by creating a globally accessible information repository containing information about products, components, bills of material, change requests, and project status. LMW is encouraging the reuse of components and expects to be able to bring its R&D costs down significantly. Project management and collaboration enable LMW to track development projects through the entire life cycle, avoiding schedule and cost overruns. The project data can also be shared with third party partners.

• Improve maintenance quality and workplace safety while ensuring regulatory compliance -- Oracle eAM provides LMW with built-in integration of manufacturing and finance applications, supporting dependent task planning, skills-based employee assignment and automated document management. LMW can optimize asset and resource utilization by managing manufacturing usage, availability, labor assignments, material requisitioning and maintenance cost of the asset from a single data repository.

• Make faster and better decisions with business intelligence -- LMW has deployed Oracle Balanced Scorecard to executives, providing up to date visibility of operating performance as measured by 29 key performance indicators, such as forecast accuracy, manufacturing lead time, days payable outstanding, and value added per employees. By providing easy online access to a single source of truth for performance results, time is saved in gathering and analyzing performance numbers, allowing for faster and better business decisions based on accurate, updated information. In addition, Oracle Balanced Scorecard is utilized to communicate important strategic objectives across an organization and enables individual departments to align their objectives with the company's overall objectives.

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Source: Oracle