Rane Implements OPEN SESAME… A case study.

Rane group is a major player in the Automobile OEM segment in India having won the prestigious Deming prize for excellence in quality for the year 2003. Rane sales turnover stands at 261 million USD. Rane Brake linings Limited has manufacturing operations in three locations Viz., Chennai. Hyderabad and pondicherry and it distributes its products all over India through distributors and dealers who are serviced by 12 warehouses spread all over the country. Rane sells its products to these warehouses and requires live primary sales data from these warehouses to monitor sales performance and inventory levels. These warehouses in turn sell to the wholesale distributors who in turn sell to consumers who can be service stations or individual consumers. Rane requires secondary sales information at the wholesale distributors level and tertiary sales information at service station level. This information is critical to production planning and for monitoring the sales performance of its products on a real-time basis. Also it was required that Whole sale distributors place purchase orders online to reduce transaction time and also publish the purchase order information in SAP R/3 which was implemented by Rane.

Acumen implemented ‘OPEN SEAME’ to enable Wholesale distributors to place purchase orders on the warehouses through the Internet. ‘OPEN SEAME’ being a web-based software, which can be accessed through a web browser has made it easier for the wholesale distributors to place purchase orders through low bandwidth broadband connections also. This Purchase order information was then published on SAP R/3 using the SAP integration architecture developed by Acumen.

Acumen then implemented ‘Surelink’ to read data about sales and inventory positions from the disparate accounting application of various wholesale distributors on an individual customer basis and publish it on ‘OPEN SESAME’.

‘Surelink’ is a desktop-based software application, which has the ability to read information from most of the accounting applications and publish it on OPEN SESAME through the Internet.

Thus Rane Brake linings requirement of complete visibility of its sales and distribution chain on a real-time basis was achieved. This in turn has improved the productivity and efficiency of the marketing and ware housing departments immensely.