What role does information technology play in the research, production, sales and marketing of vegetable seeds? GAURAV PATRA profiles Nunhems Seeds, India’s third largest vegetable seeds company to find an answer

Hema Abhichandani says the main advantage with using the Navision platform is that they can design and generate their reports as per their requirements

An integrated inventory management and financial system from Navision has seamlessly integrated the multilocation business activities of Nunhems Seeds, the Rs 22 crore, 100 percent subsidiary of the Nunza Group, now part of the Bayer Group. Nunhems, incorporated in 1995 and now India’s third largest vegetable seeds company, operates through four main locations in India. Its corporate office is at Gurgaon, registered office at Hyderabad, production centre at Nedchal in Andhra Pradesh, and R&D centre at Bangalore. Apart from this, the company also has two marketing offices at Jaipur and Panchkula, and a distributor network of C&F agents across all other states. The company is primarily into research, production, sales and marketing of vegetable seeds.

Role of IT

Information technology is considered to be an integral part of Nunhems’ business. “In our case, IT is actually working as a service department,” says Hema Abichandani, company secretary, Nunhems. Although some of the functions of its IT department have been outsourced, the department is in a good position to meet the demands of its users and has a team of professionals to manage its WAN set-up and applications. For other hardware-related activities there is a separate team. All the locations are connected through VPNs. At Gurgaon and Hyderabad the company has gone in for satellite connectivity. At Bangalore and the second location in Hyderabad it has ISDN connectivity. The company also has a radio link as a back-up between different locations. Recently, the seed major has also applied for leased line connectivity.

Why an integrated system?
In the initial days of its operations in India, Nunhems used Tally as its accounting system. As the company grew bigger and got into the international market, a major change was required in terms of MIS and data availability.

“Tally was a solution for a relatively smaller operation. When data volumes increased, and we entered bigger markets, the company’s portfolio of services also increased, and the absence of a better system was felt,” explains Abichandani. With the increasing complexity of the business, the company realised it was difficult to manage with a system like Tally. At that point of time data transfer between different locations was only through floppies, and on more than one occasion Nunhems found a problem with the floppies; it was also very time-consuming. The management then understood that changing business needs could only be met with a new system in place.

Why Navision?
Tally was no longer fulfilling Nunhems’ requirements, so it explored the market for a solution which would offer more than Tally, but which was not as complicated as SAP. “We believe all these high-end products like SAP and Oracle do not suit relatively smaller businesses like ours. We were not ready for that kind of application,” says Abichandani. Nunhems was then in the process of implementing different business solutions, and came across Euro Info Systems, Navision’s solution centre. Euro Info, with its long association with Navision and experience in Navision products, was able to promise a perfect fit for Nunhems’ requirements. It carried out a gap-analysis of existing processes, and prepared a scheduled changeover plan.

The total project cycle including study, customisation, training and implementation was completed in just two months, and cost about Rs 28 lakh. The project went live in April 2002 and is performing well. Since all the computers at Nunhems are Pentium III-based, it did not have to upgrade the existing system to implement Navision; it only had to add certain servers to the set-up. To connect different locations Nunhems had to go in for a Citrix server and also had to purchase an application server, Microsoft Windows 2000.

Says Abichandani, “Navision Financials 2.6 meets the needs of a medium-sized company like ours. The product offers information in real-time for us to plan and manage our inventory, and helps streamline our multi-location operations.” (Since two-thirds of Indian agriculture is rain-fed, the vegetable and seeds business needs an up-to-date and instantaneous MIS to take care of climatic contingencies.)

Apart from Nunhems, Nunza now also uses Navision in five countries of Europe; the Turkey unit is also in the process of implementing the same package.

Benefits
According to Abichandani, the main advantage of the Navision platform is that it can design and generate reports as per their requirements—sales-wise, region-wise, crops-wise, performance evaluation-wise. She says this package is so flexible that whenever the company needs any sort of data, it is easy to extract that information. This kind of flexibility was not there earlier, and the reports had to be done manually. Because the company now has access to any sort of information at the click of a mouse, the management is now in a better position to take the right decisions.

In the first phase of its implementation, Nunhems had gone in for just some basic modules like financials, inventory and payroll solutions. (Before the implementation of Navision, the company used two different packages from two different vendors for financials and inventory; payroll was outsourced.)

In days to come, the company is planning to go in for the quality assurance module, and also take a look at an effective system for the management of seeds.