Chennai, July 19, 2004 --- Lakshmi Machine Works Ltd. (LMW), one of the world's largest textile spinning machinery manufacturers, has increased revenue by 20 percent in the last year. Oracle E-Business Suite implementation has helped in this achievement.

Marking one of the largest Oracle E-Business Suite deployments, LMW selected a phased implementation and went live on the first phase in 2003, just 10 months after the implementation began. LMW is currently using Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (eAM), Oracle Balanced Scorecard, Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS), Oracle Manufacturing, Oracle Sales, Oracle Services and Oracle Procurement. The current implementation of Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) concludes the second phase of deployment.

"LMW has seen positive results from the implementation of Oracle," said Sanjay Jayavarthanavelu, Wholetime Director, LMW. "The automation of processes across financials and improved efficiencies in our manufacturing operations helped us to increase revenue and cut costs last year, and Oracle E-Business Suite holds promise to help us maintain such growth."

"LMW has used an unified information architecture and a large footprint of Oracle E-Business Suite to automate its complete production, sales and product development cycles," said Mr Shekhar Dasgupta, Oracle India Private Limited. "LMW has successfully aligned the Oracle E-Business Suite implementation with overall change management and used the scorecard approach to drive better corporate performance."

Founded in 1962, LMW is one of only three manufacturers worldwide that provide a complete range of textile machinery and boasts 68 percent market share in India. To effectively compete with rising global competition and price pressures, the company needed to implement aggressive cost controls, become more responsive to customer requirements, increase supply chain efficiency and introduce decision-making processes based on business intelligence. After an extensive search for enterprise software that was capable of automating end-to-end business processes, including customer relationship management, financials, human resources, product life cycle management and supply chain management, LMW selected Oracle applications.

Standardizing On Oracle Improves Operations

With Oracle E-Business Suite, LMW has been able o:

• Make faster and better decisions with business intelligence - LMW has deployed Oracle Balanced Scorecard to executives, providing up to date visibility of operating performance covering : Customer, Financial, Internal process and Learning & Growth perspectives. By providing easy online access to a single source for performance results, time is saved in gathering and analyzing performance numbers, allowing for faster and better business decisions based on accurate, updated information. In addition, Oracle Balanced Scorecard is utilized to communicate important strategic objectives across an organization and enables individual departments to align their objectives with the company's overall objectives.
• Manage innovation - Leveraging Oracle PLM applications, LMW is targeting a 15 percent reduction in time to market new products by creating a globally accessible information repository containing information about products, components, bills of material, change requests, and project status. LMW is encouraging the reuse of components and now expects to bring its R&D costs down significantly. Project management and collaboration enable LMW to track development projects through the entire life cycle, avoiding schedule and cost overruns. The project data can also be shared with third party partners.
• Shorten the sales cycle - LMW equipped its sales people with 360-degree views of its customers. With Oracle Sales, the integrated tools simplify the tracking and management of sales forecasts, leads, opportunities, quoting, configuring, and ordering products - improving the productivity of the sales team and enabling it to shorten the sales cycle. In addition, Oracle Configurator enables LMW to facilitate an efficient and smother process of configuring a sales order, providing customer bills for each machine and accurate calculation of standard costs and production lead time.
• Empower the workforce - With Oracle HRMS, LMW's workforce uses Oracle HR Self Service to complete common administrative tasks themselves, such as updating personal information, benefits administration, leave requests, training requests and appraisals. By empowering employees to manage their own HR-related information, LMW's HR department can focus its attention on strategic corporate initiatives and employee growth programs.
• Improve asset uptime - Oracle eAM provides LMW with built-in integration of manufacturing and finance applications, supporting dependent task planning, skills-based employee assignment, and automated document management. LMW can optimize asset and resource utilization by managing manufacturing usage, availability, labor assignments, material requisitioning and maintenance cost of the asset from a single data repository.