SUCCESS STORY

Informatica Paints a Colourful

Picture at Asian Paints
By standardizing on Informatica, India’s leading paint
manufacturer reduces the time needed to run its product
costing model from 24 hours to 20 minutes.

“Informatica is playing a vital role in enabling Asian Paints’ analytical

Fast facts decisions, based on a consolidated and trusted view of product costing data.”
— Aashish Kshetry, General Manager Systems, Asian Paints
Business Initiatives
• Respond more quickly to market change
Consider the Asian Paints Dilemma
• Analyze cost data and increase efficiency
Every quarter, an ominous date would appear on the Asian Paints calendar. It was the time when
Technology Strategy supply chain management and accounts staff at India’s largest paint company would perform
the product costing process. This task involved determining the SKU level costs of the company’s
Implemented the Informatica Platform;
paint products, which would include the raw material and packing material prices based on their
in this instance consisting of Informatica estimated or actual consumption averages. The resultant information was the determining factor in
PowerCenter® and Informatica future pricing decisions, cost savings measurements, inventory valuations, demand forecasts and
PowerConnect. Included a custom user income projections for the company. However, despite being critical to Asian Paints’ success, it was
interface to create a shared product costing not a popular system. Data in the standalone system required substantial manual intervention
system for the company’s portfolio of and the innate inflexibility meant that if a mistake was made and the cost output was wrong, the
team had to start all over again.
paint products. Informatica integrates raw
material, BOM and other data—regardless A long-standing, satisfied Informatica® customer, Asian Paints again turned to Informatica to
of its source or structure, including the quickly and accurately access, integrate and trust the raw material, bill of materials (BOM) and
other data used in the product costing system. The solution accesses all the data regardless of
deployed SAP, Infor Optiva, and i2 (now JDA)
its source or structure—including the deployed SAP, Infor Optiva, and i2 (now JDA) environments.
environments.
By standardizing on Informatica technology for this product costing system, Asian Paints is
equipped to respond more quickly to market price changes of raw materials, thereby increasing
competitiveness. The company has reduced costs by integrating and delivering data at the right
time, in the right format. And the consolidated, trusted view of costing data has resulted in more
accurate and timely supply chain and marketing decisions. Moreover, Asian Paints has reduced
the time required to run the quarterly product costing model from 24 hours to 20 minutes, and
for the first time, product costs can be calculated simultaneously across all manufacturing plants,
thereby boosting productivity and efficiency.
Benefits Painting the World
Asian Paints is India’s largest paint company and ranked among the top ten Decorative
• Enabled the company to respond more
coatings companies in the world with a turnover of over USD 1 billion. Asian Paints along with
quickly to market price changes, thereby
its subsidiaries has operations in 17 countries across the world with 22 paint manufacturing
increasing competitiveness
facilities, servicing consumers in 65 countries
• Reduced time required to run quarterly
product costing model from 24 hours to Each of Asian Paint’s three business units—Decorative, Industrial, and International—has registered
20 minutes, which is a fraction of time strong growth in the past few years, partly because of the company’s competitive cost structure.
required previously By accurately measuring and analyzing all the costs associated with paint manufacturing and
• Decreased costs by integrating and adding a suitable operating margin, the company is able to sustain its growing income. The data
delivering data at the right time, in the associated with product cost can be used in other ways as well: to improve inventory management
right format and optimize plant level product mix.
• Drove better research, development But measuring the exact cost of paint production is complicated. For example, Asian Paints needs
and marketing decisions based on to examine the actual cost of each of the raw materials that goes into the manufacturing process.
consolidated, trusted view of pricing data
This cost analysis demands an accurate knowledge of Asian Paints’ raw materials supplier level
• Enabled product costs to be calculated prices and the alternate raw materials available for use. And it requires rich insight into multi
simultaneously across all manufacturing level bill of materials (BOM) and multiple formulation versions. Armed with this holistic view,
plants, thereby boosting productivity and Asian Paints is able to make strategic and tactical business decisions, including pricing, income
efficiency
forecasts, and operating margins.
• Allowed Asian Paints to run product
costing simultaneously and preserve/
archive multiple scenarios across Large Degree of Manual Intervention in Legacy Product
Business Units: Decorative, Industrial and
Automotive
Costing System
Previously, Asian Paints was relying on a 10-year-old legacy product costing system. Based on
Nuts and Bolts a legacy RDBMS platform, the stand alone system contained the bill of material information
• Solution: Data integration and all other data had to be manually massaged and validated before loading into the system
describes Maulik Desai, Senior Manager Systems Development, Asian Paints on the inflexibility of
• Product: Informatica PowerCenter with a
the legacy product costing system. “There was a large degree of manual intervention required to
custom user interface
determine the product cost,” he says. “For example, we had to manually identify which alternative
• Sources: SAP, Infor Optiva PLM system,
paint ingredients were being used in the manufacturing process, load the expected consumption
and i2 supply chain management
rates of the raw materials into the legacy system, analyze and further massage the outputs using
solution
spreadsheets.”
• Target: Unified product costing system
The costing system is run on a quarterly basis, and the team began to fear the date as it loomed
on the calendar. Because the landed raw material prices differed from plant to plant, this data
had to be uploaded site by site, and that meant the product cost model for each of the company’s
five paint manufacturing plants in India had to run sequentially, adding to the run time and
preventing side-by-side plant comparisons. There was no means of filtering different costing
models for an individual business unit, such as Decorative or Industrial. And although Asian Paints
has a strong ethos for getting it right the first time, if a mistake was made and the cost output was
wrong, the users had to start all over again. “It reached the stage where it took one day for each
manufacturing plant to complete the costing run,” says Desai. “This not only wasted our resources,
it undermined our ability to respond quickly to price changes of raw materials in the market.”
Asian Paints didn’t have to look far for a solution. The company has been an Informatica customer
for several years, using the enterprise data integration platform to reconcile and deliver large
amounts of supply chain planning data across various sources—a daunting and complex task
that was previously time consuming and riddled with validation errors. Specifically, Informatica
technology is part of the company’s supply chain planning suite from i2 (now JDA) acting as
the integration hub between the source systems and planning engines. By standardizing on the
Informatica Platform for operational system integration, Asian Paints is empowered to better
understand trends in the paint market, gain enterprise-wide visibility into operations, and obtain a
single version of the truth.

The Informatica Solution Decreases Time to Value for

Business Intelligence Projects
According to Harish Lade, Chief Manager, Systems, Informatica was the first and only choice for
all of the company’s data integration needs. “Over the years, Informatica has provided Asian Paints
with a scalable and flexible foundation for data integration to sustain best-of-breed IT landscape.
Informatica has helped reduce data integration times in a variety of IT projects, ensuring that
integration projects remain on time and within budget”.
Informatica provides the Indian manufacturer with all the capability it needs to access, integrate
and trust the raw material, BOM and other data used in the product costing system. The solution
accesses all the data regardless of its source or structure, including the deployed SAP enterprise
resource planning, Infor Optiva, and i2 environments. Informatica then reconciles discrepancies in
the way Asian Paints’ different systems structure data, thereby maintaining a consistent view of the
product costing data across all systems. All of these steps allow Asian Paints to rely on a unified,
available and secure product costing system—shared throughout the business.

Data: BOM related

Freq: 1 hr

Optiva APL
MDM
BOM
Data:
Freq: Run Time Data: BOM related
Data: RMC Freq: Run Time
Freq: 3 months

Data: Base RM/Int

Freq: Run Time
i2
Costing
(JDA)
Data: RMC, Vol, Setup
Freq: Run Time

Figure 1: Informatica technology integrates data from multiple different sources to provide a unified, real-time
product costing system
The new system delivers the flexibility, agility, and data standardization that Asian Paints’ business LEARN MORE
users have been wanting for. Product costs can now be calculated simultaneously, not sequentially,
Learn more about the Informatica Platform.
across all five paint manufacturing plants, thereby boosting productivity and efficiency. The time
Visit us at www.informatica.com or
required to run the quarterly costing model has been reduced from 24 hours to 20 minutes,
call +1 650-385-5000 (1-800-653-3871
which is a fraction of the time required previously. And by introducing a separate cost model
in the U.S.).
setup and run for each business unit (Decorative, Industrial and International), Asian Paints can
now run product costing simultaneously and archive multiple scenarios. The earlier problem of
choosing different ingredients and formulation versions for different Plants and Products has also
been simplified with the new option of setting varied alternates across manufacturing plants or ABOUT INFORMATICA
products. Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA) is
Amit Kumar Baveja, Chief Manager, Asian Paints Supply Chain, comments, “The new costing the world’s number one independent provider
system based on Informatica provides Asian Paints with a highly robust decision support system. of data integration software. Organizations
This has happened by presence of features like plant level costing which in turn can be aggregated around the world gain a competitive advantage
to company level, ease in finding causals for product cost changes and reduction in end to end in today’s global information economy with
cycle time of doing the costing. In turn, it has helped in enhancing the process capability w.r.t to timely, relevant and trustworthy data for their
both timeliness and accuracy. Seamless integration of costing with our MRP system is an added top business imperatives. More than 3,900
benefit.” enterprises worldwide rely on Informatica to
access, integrate and trust their information
“The new product costing system, based on Informatica, has transformed our operational assets held in the traditional enterprise, off
efficiency,” says Desai. “The new system offers Asian Paints a degree of flexibility we used to dream premise and in the Cloud.
of, greatly increasingly our pricing accuracy. For example, if there is a change in the price of one of
the raw materials, we can immediately see the impact on the selling price of the paint. And we can
play around with an infinite number of ‘what if?’ scenarios. Informatica is playing a vital role in our
analytical decision making, driving better research, development and marketing decisions based
on a consolidated, trusted view of pricing data.”

Worldwide Headquarters, 100 Cardinal Way, Redwood City, CA 94063, USA

phone: 650.385.5000 fax: 650.385.5500 toll-free in the US: 1.800.653.3871 www.informatica.com
Informatica Business Solutions PVT LTD, Diamond Street, Tower B, 3rd Floor #150 Airport Road, Bangalore 560008, India
phone: +91 80 402 03000 fax: +91 80 411 25483

© 2010 Informatica Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Informatica, the Informatica logo, and The Data Integration Company are trademarks or registered trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in
jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners. First Published: May 2010
7134 (05/17/2010)