Wind-power Limited - Case Study

2010 M S Ramaiah

Overview
Wind-power Limited is a Wind-mill / Wind-turbine Power Generation company head-quartered in Japan.
The current turn-over of this company is US $ 2 Billion. They currently execute about 3000 to 3500
projects in a year throughout the globe. They foresee that this number would grow to 6000 by 2010,
effectively increasing the turn-over to about US $ 4 Billion. The current employee strength is about
5000 and they plan to grow to about 7000 by 2010.
Wind-power Limited India manufactures a total of 5 models, whereas Wind-power Limited China
manufactures 3 models and also has a R&D facility.
This company is organized as follows:
Two Manufacturing plants one at Nasik in India and the other at Beijing in China.
Fifty Sales/ Project Installation locations all across the globe
The current business model is as follows:
Sales
o
o
o
o

locations
Acquire business opportunities from their geographies
Carry out the design along with the manufacturing plants and the customer
Estimate and prepare detailed quotes
Submit proposal, negotiate and win deals

During project execution,

o The manufacturing plants source components / assemblies from their vendors
o assemble the products at their locations
o carry out tests as per the requirements
o ship it out to the Project Locations
o At the Project Locations, all the sub-assemblies from the different plants are assembled,
tested and commissioned
o In addition they contract out their assemblies/sub-assemblies /components to 20 vendors
both in India and China, contributing to 60% of the product value
This company has a number of legacy and custom-built MIS applications for their day-today functioning.
Some of them are 3-tier web-based applications, most of them based on Oracle.
They see the following challenges (from the MIS side) which they need to solve to gear up for their
aggressive growth plans ahead:
From customer requirements to design due to current system limitations, their quotation
process currently takes about 2 weeks, which leads to loss of opportunities or increase the salescycle.
The customer requirements are getting very specific and diverse. This leads to higher number of
variants and more complex assemblies / sub-assemblies. The key challenge is to bring in
standardization across assemblies / sub-assemblies at the same time, being able to respond to
unique / specific requirements of the customers.
While they have gained substantial advantages with vendors, to gear up for this high growth,
they feel the need for much tighter integration / collaboration with the vendor systems to
increase efficiencies.

1 of 2

Wind-power Limited Case Study

To gain price competitive advantages and to increase quality/ performance

need to expand their vendor-base

levels, they also

Their nearest competitor is just about 3 points away in terms of market-share. Hence, they feel
the need for competitive analysis and business intelligence solutions
They also feel the need to access these systems and information using todays technologies like
web or from mobile devices.
Implementation Needs:
Wind-power Limited plans to implement SAP based solutions to meet their requirements. During the
first phase, they intend to cover
3000 users to go live with, scaling to 5000 in the next 6 months
The two manufacturing locations
10 Sales / project execution locations across 7 countries UK, Italy, France, Germany, India,
Japan and China
Integrating Dealers
The current system landscape is as follows:
Sales / Project Execution Locations:
Oracle based home-grown, stand-alone applications to gather Customer requirements for
qualifying opportunities at each location
The opportunities get consolidated into a single database using a day-end batch-process
Design information is available at the two manufacturing locations which they access using webbased applications for developing their quotes / estimates.
Opportunities are reviewed based on the home-grown query based systems
Manufacturing Locations:
Each plant has its own MFG pro based systems for materials planning and shop-floor control,
which need to be improved
Vendors are given periodic updates on orders and fore-casts on a quarterly basis using webbased custom-built applications
Wind-power Limited India is representative of all manufacturing processes across the Windpower Limited manufacturing locations
Warranty and dealers:
Wind-power Limited has 50 dealers across Europe who has their own home grown systems.
Finance and Costing:
They currently use Glovia for their AR, AP and GL.
The month-end / quarter-end / year-end account closure requires consolidation across
manufacturing and plant locations. This is carried out manually using MS Excel spread-sheets.

2 of 2