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Praxis: Handholding Businesses through the SAP Journey

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Dattatreya R. Kulkarni,Director

SAP Business One is an affordable, integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP)solution designed to enable the growth of small to midsized enterprises (SMEs)and large enterprises with subsidiary operations to better manage their entire company. The definition sure sounds easy, but the implementation of the same while staying well within the time and budget limit is something of an uncomfortable undertaking. Based out of Pune, Praxis Info Solutions Private Limited, an award-winning SAP Gold Partner with deep domain knowledge, years of experience and proven track record of implementing SAP Business One, HRMS and BI solutions for businesses in the SME sector- helps companies implement SAP Business One efficiently and effectively.

Implementation Strategies and Beyond
Driven by a team of industry veterans carrying rich experience from Tier One IT firms, Praxis has acquired approximately 80 customers in a span of 8 years from several states of India including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, MP and Chandigarh. As mentioned earlier, implementing SAP has never been a piece of cake. The Director, Dattatreya R. Kulkarni explains, “Implementing SAP Business One is as much an art as it is science. It’s not enough to follow a well-defined & proven methodology. It has got a lot to do with your people management and change management skills”. He also believes that customer’s (CEO/MD) responsibility does not end at placing a PO on a carefully chosen partner. They need to steer the project and get involved whenever necessary to make

decisions regarding contentious issues. They need to identify the right team members for the project execution and allow them to invest quality time on project work.

"Sap Business One offers A Good Number Of Operational Reports Required By Regular Business Users On Daily Basis"

SAP Business One gives a 360-degree view of customers. One can track most important KPIs regarding the relationship with any customer via a single user interface, be it the number of sales opportunities, sales quotations, sales orders, service requests, or outstanding balance etc. With pervasive analytics feature in SAP Business One on HANA platform, one can easily create dashboards with visualization and assign them to the business partner master data. This allows the user to get 360-degree view of customers visually as well. The potential to use pervasive analytics is immense and it’s left to the imagination of the customer and partner to extract most varied analysis of the customer relationship.

As partner, Praxis guides their customers to correct course and avoid dangerous territories – be it in the form of master data accuracy(or lack of it), inflexibility to consider changes to business processes or insisting on building a complex solution for handling rarely occurring boundary line exceptional business scenarios. Not all customers may be open to adopting global best practices as against their existing practices; therefore, Praxis educates and coaches them to widen their perspectives. Praxis’ experience plays a great deal of importance in such situations.

SAP Business One offers a good number of operational reports required by regular business users on daily basis. However, the MIS needs of the company’s management go much beyond such reports. To address these needs, Praxis leverages SAP HANA to build analytical report set whenever the customer runs their SAP Business One on HANA platform. In addition to this and for all non-HANA customers, Praxis offers comprehensive business intelligence solutions leveraging their

partnerships with other BI product OEMs. The company has an install base of customers using these solutions for getting meaningful analytics from their business data on a near real time basis and making critical business decisions based on the same.

Having Served a Wide Spectrum of Verticals
Praxis has recorded success stories with a plethora of clients across multiple industry verticals from General Manufacturers to Automotive Component Manufacturers and Specialty Chemicals to Food Processing Companies. An Italian manufacturer of high-quality reeds, with a manufacturing facility in Kolhapur faced slow productivity with their manual tracking of processes. By implementing SAP Business One, Praxis ensured more than 30 percent reduction in manual work. Praxis also caused a significant improvement in DSO while providing greater visibility into operations.

Another Bulk Material Handling Solutions manufacturer from United States, with India operations based out of Pune, were in doldrums with their ERP solution struggling to fulfill key business requirements of the operations department(inventory, manufacturing etc.). More so, maintaining the system was tedious and expensive. With Praxis implementing SAP Business One, the client witnessed 10-20 percent improvement in tracking material consumption. The manual work was reduced by 20 percent and the visibility into the operations was enhanced.

The Future
Praxis invests on an ongoing basis developing competencies in new technology and process innovations in line with SAP’s product enrichment initiatives and roadmap. Praxis has already initiated action towards getting prepared with solutions for customers on the IoT and AI front - leveraging SAP Business One. In addition to this, Praxis keeps upgrading its industry specific add-on solutions in line with business changes and is well positioned to expand its presence pan India.

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Praxis: Handholding Businesses through the SAP Journey