“By upgrading to a high-performing and scalable Oracle Database 12c and Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.5, we now create financial reports for periodic closings up to 10x faster, have streamlined invoice approval processes, and better manage Indian taxation requirements.”

— M.R. Patel, IT Director, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Co-operative Ltd.

Founded in 1967, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Ltd. (IFFCO) is India’s leading co-operative organization for the production and sale of fertilizers, with five manufacturing plants across multiple states, including Gujarat, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh. Representing over 35,000 farmer co-operative societies, IFFCO produces 4.2 million tons of urea and 4.3 million tons of diammonium phosphate (DAP) and nitrogen, phosphate, potash (NPK) annually. It is also a major contributor to Indian government programs that aim to increase food-grain production in the country.

To become one of the country’s largest chemical fertilizer producers, IFFCO has diversified its business into other industries - including insurance, communication, trading, and power generation - and expanded overseas through joint venture partnerships with companies in the Middle East and North Africa

Challenges:

• Improve the fertilizer production company’s database and ERP system performance to eliminate data corruption issues and reduce maintenance workload, such as patching and caching
• Create faster reports for periodic closings and support goods and services tax (GST) implementation for its fertilizer-production businesses
• Streamline invoice approval process and meet Indian taxation requirements, such as using Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) rate for income tax collection

Results:

• Gained faster insight into fertilizer-production businesses by upgrading to Oracle Database 12c and Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.5 and generating various reports, such as vendor ledger and inventory summary reports, for monthly, quarterly, and annual financial closings up to 10x faster
• Increased user productivity by ensuring system reliability and scalability and enabling staff members to work normal rather than extended hours to meet financial closings deadlines
• Simplified system administration and management with online patching capability, automatic table caching and the ability to purge old statistics with Oracle Database 12c
• Improved invoice approval process efficiency by automatically applying various TDS rates for supplier credit memo and invoices to the Commissioner of Income Tax rather than taking one minute each to manually verify the tax rate for a large volume of invoices generated from all the manufacturing plants
• Enhanced data security by using Oracle E-Business Suite’s Flexfield value set security feature to enable specific permission controls to view, insert, or update business-critical information, such as vendor pricing for supplying raw materials
• Minimized accounting discrepancy issues by standardizing on Oracle Database 12c with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.5 across all manufacturing plants—increasing application performance while reducing rounding off differences in control accounts and correctly calculating asset amortization and depreciation
• Supported the planned introduction of a GST to value added goods, such as urea and DAP, and met Indian taxation requirements, thanks to a flexible Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.5
• Improved user experience by providing an intuitive home page with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2.5 and allowing business users to easily navigate or use the system

“We upgraded to Oracle Database 12c and Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.5 to take advantage of new enterprise innovation that increases performance and scalability of our ERP platform across all manufacturing plants. We were also familiar with Oracle applications, so it was a natural choice for us.”

— M.R. Patel, IT Director, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Co-operative Ltd.

Execution

IFFCO’s internal IT team worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support to define the business requirements and system configuration before migrating to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.5 and Oracle Database 12c. The combined Oracle-IFFCO team also conducted key business user testing by running 400 test cases and resolving all the issues encountered. The team completed a dry run in 96 hours and achieved a cutover window in 86 hours. IFFCO went live with the new platform smoothly in 5 months. Oracle Advanced Customer Support continued to provide post go-live support and assisted IFFCO to resolve post production issues in two weeks instead of one month.