Majis Industrial Services SAOC (MISC) is a Government of Oman owned company engaged in providing various water utility services at the Sohar Industrial Port Area. M G Premanand, Financial Controller, MISC, spoke to H20 on the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the organisation.
Could you provide an overview of MISC’s core business activities?
M G Premanand
MISC is the provider of various water utility services at the Sohar Industrial Port Area in Oman. It is a Governmentowned company currently providing chlorinated sea water for industrial cooling applications, process water and potable water, with future plans to provide sanitary waste water collection and treated industrial waste water collection services. MISC will also construct a Reverse Osmosis (RO) based desalination facility in the near future.
What were the main reasons behind your decision to implement ERP?
The need to effectively manage a multitude of critical business processes including Finance, Asset Management, HR, Payroll, Supply Chain, Customer billing and projects. We were looking for a solution that is integrated while providing the option to implement them in phases.
We were keen to have a solution that is user friendly, quick on implementation and easy to be trained on as we expand our services and have new employees on board. Business Intelligence was another important tool that we were looking for in order to enable decision makers even while on the move to be able to monitor and decide on key issues. We found the Dash Board based BI module of IFS very appropriate and user friendly.
What tipped the choice in IFS’ favour?
IFS ERP solutions boast flexible and scalable functionalities and will equip us with the necessary tools to simplify and integrate our business processes. We wanted a partner whose ERP solutions boast strong enterprise asset management, service management, project management as well as business intelligence functionalities as these are important for our company to grow and maintain a competitive edge in an increasingly challenging environment.
What were the requirements and criteria from a water utility business point of view? How did IFS ERP help with these issues?
Asset management with GIS interface, Customer billing interfacing with SCADA, Project Management interfacing with Primavera and reporting based on Earned Value Analysis and arriving at per unit cost of production of various utilities were important criteria from a water utility business point besides having the ability to define business critical dash board to navigate the organisation.
We are a fairly new organisation, and during the start up phase, we used an elementary accounting package. So we had no legacy to constrain us. We found IFS had significant utility implementation expertise and were confident we would benefit from the refinement the product would have undergone over the years with inputs from various leading utility customers. We believe that the entire organisation will be positively impacted by implementation of the solution.
Did you have to undertake business process re-engineering as a precursor for the ERP implementation?
We had no legacy systems to bother us; hence, there weren’t any BPR issues. We are happy to implement the solution as it is without customisation.
What are the steps that have been taken to ensure a smooth roll out? We have the ERP rolled out at our Corporate Office in Muscat and our Operations in Sohar. We went through extensive testing and parallel run of the accounting package for two months and did not face any major issues for the modules rolled out.
How are you addressing change management and training?
IFS is providing us with user manuals and they have an excellent online help functionality that can be tapped from the screen by the user.
