‘We intend to focus on cloud and mobility this year’

Pertisth Mankotia, head, IT, Sheela Foam is instrumental in developing and implementing home-grown ERP solutions. He was responsible for digitization of an enterprise and enhancing speed and innovation in the business. The key projects initiated by Pertisth include tracking secondary sales, tertiary sales, controlled wholeselling to un-authorized dealers, accessing the channel stock, improving the serviceability, improved operational efficiencies, reduced wastages and implementation of TOC. He transformed a simple SMS technology to control market price, brought in weekly monitoring and strong daily-update mechanisms. He completely transformed the ICT scenario from just a few rudimentary and standalone systems.

Speaking to VOICE&DATA, Pertisth Mankotia shares insights on technologies that enabled Sheela Foam to overcome business challenges...

Hagement? ow are you utilizing ICT right from vendor management, manufacturing, logistics management, distribution management, to billing man-

Sheela Foam is the leading manufacturer of polyurethane foam in India. It is one of the largest in South Asia and has footprints in India and Australia. Amongst our brands ‘Sleepwell’ and ‘Feather foam’ leads. And the turnover of the group is more than 1H500 crore. In India and Australia we have over 12 and 5 manufacturing unitsH respectively using state-of-the-art technology.

Information technology caters to our entire business processes right from the procurementH supply chainH logisticsH productionH distribution to billing. These IT processes are handled by the homegrown enterprise resource planning (NRP) solutions. It is also extended to distributors. Automation solutionsH developed in-houseH can also contributed immensely to our business operations.

How is ICT helping boost the bottomline?

The SMS solution is playing a significant role to boost our bottomlineH align our performance parameters and enhance our turnover. With the help of in-house NRPH we built a system to send out every employee daily and weekly reports via SMS. This solution was primarily deployed to keep a tab on throughputH the difference between unit sale price and unit variable costH and to focus on margins.

This SMS solution included the