Enterprise-Wide Resignations!
The hair-raising story of how hundreds of top-drawer executives are chucking up their jobs to learn ERP
Be warned; this story is not for the faint-hearted. Even as you read this, hundreds upon hundreds of middle and senior level managers, working in the bluest of bluechip Indian companies, with degrees form IIMs and IITs, are voluntarily chucking their jobs in favour of a high-risk gamble. In offices tucked away in the nooks and corners of the metropolises and manned by skeletal staff, you can see them spending 10-hour days on gruelling, sometimes dubious, three-month courses that promise a fantastic, international career growth.
I know it is a gamble, says Ganesh Sharma, a middle-level Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) executive who resigned his job three months ago, and paid Rs 3 lakh to study at a training institution in Hyderabad. But it is one worth taking. I could end up going abroad and making crores. To qualify, it doesnt matter which field you are working in, and you dont really need a background in software.
Welcome to the hot, exploding, crazy world of ERP. It is where professionals in India are now being given the promise of astronomical salaries, even by Western standards. It is also, undoubtedly, one of the fastest growing sectors abroad, and where people are leveraging a paltry six months to two years of ERP experience into heavy duty career jumps.
States Rohit Chandra, Seattle-based software consultant, For professionals across the board it is the hottest thing on the market right now. The salaries are phenomenal. People with six months to one years experience are demanding around $7000-10,000 per month and getting away with it. After a year or two of working in ERP, salaries are in the region of $15,000-20,000 per month, and more. A software professional, on the other hand, can expect a salary of $5-6,000 per month when he starts work. I know of Indians who are getting a piece of the action.
And, in the last eight months, training institutions, some mere sweatshops, have mushroomed across the country promising executives they will get that US-based job they always dreamed of. In Delhi alone, four have come up in the last eight months. In Hyderabad, the nerve centre of this trend, there are an estimated 13-17 institutions. Chennai and Bangalore together account for another 10.
ERP, or Enterprise-wide Resource Planning, says Y K Gupta, GM, Sapient, one of the leading ERP training organisations, is a term that encompasses all functions in an organisation, as also the class of tools used to improve and rationalise those functions.
Every organisation, he says, has a cluster of functions: recruitment, HR, production, stocking, dispatching, realising payments, sales, finance, etc. ERP simply tries to optimise the working of these different sections through strategic planning, systems integration and IT implementation.
To put it in laymans terms, ERP involves computerisation and regularised data storage of the different sections in an organisation. Thus, in company X that has undergone an ERP exercise, each and every department will have its own software package, hardware facilities, and a link-up with the overall system.
Today, ERP is regarded as one of the hottest managerial tools worldwide. In 1997 the worldwide market was around $8.7 billion and growing at an incredible 10-15 per cent per annum. In the largest category, known as the industrial segment of discrete and process manufacturers, it was around $6.8 billion.
In India, while size and estimates are unavailable, the names of companies who have opted for ERP give an indication of its popularity: HLL, Mahindra & Mahindra, ONGC, Colourchem, Boots Pharma, Essar Group.... The trend of ERP implementation is said to have started in the late eighties. We were one of the first to implement an ERP solution for HLL, says Sid Khanna, managing partner, Andersen Consulting, back in the late eighties.
The international market for professionals with expertise in ERP has simply exploded. The ERP cycle, says a source at Price Waterhouse, has peaked abroad. In the West, corporates flush with funds are rushing in to implement this tool. ERP implementation is a specific skill, and not too many people have it. And since it is a new phenomenon, those who do have the skill-set, usually have a maximum of two to three years of experience. Its a sellers market.
There is today a massive, ERP-related, requirement of middle and senior level professionals, with expertise in almost every field you can think of; sales and distribution, finance, materials management, company law, and so on. A lot of the required expertise, says V Srinivas, formerly an executive with Wipro GE, could be tapped from India. We are banking on that assumption.
Which is where the urgency lies for people such as Sharma and Srinivas. It is the common perception in India today that only people with software expertise can avail of employment opportunities abroad. That, however, may no longer be the case.
The implementation of an ERP process, says Gupta, involves three groups. First, the business consultant who provides the theoretical and strategic inputs. Then the IT implementor people such as SAP, Baan or Oracle that provide the software (they account for 30-40 per cent of the input), and last, the systems integrators, ie people such as CMC or Tata Infotech who provide hardware and get the system to work.
SAP, Baan, Oracle and PeopleSoft are the packages that implement the ERP process. For instance, after ERP, the sales department is now online and all past and current data is accessible to managers for realtime analysis. SAP, incidentally, belongs to a fast-growing German company by the same name, and is considered the hottest package going.
However, the people who make the package, ie the software programmers, have a constraint. The software they make is intended for people in radically different organisations and sections. It is important, says Gupta, to have a functional intermediary between the coder and the client. That is why there is a huge requirement for professionals form all walks of life. So to design and implement a software for the sales department of an organisation, you need to have sales people working with the software developers.
And this is the reason why an estimated 2,500 executives from across industry have flooded the gates of training schools such as Sapient, FCS, NM Compusys and Pegasus. They are paying a fee that varies from between Rs 1.75 to Rs 3 lakh for a three to four month course. Part of the contract involves a promise made by the institute that it will get the trainee a job abroad. Sapient, for instance, promises a minimum salary of $50,000 after completion of the course. It is now conducting the training of the second batch of students, having started operations in July 97.
The problem is, will this gamble pay off? In the first place, already there seem to be no means of certifying the worth of a training institute. Many even deny that they are a training school. We are a company, says Gupta, for instance, and the people whom you saw here are employees. In fact, SAP regulations forbid the opening of training institutions for individuals, so companies such as Sapient get around it by employing the people who want to take the course.
Already there are horror stories about this or the other executive who ended up paying lakhs to an institution, and ended up without a job. About executives who are waiting for jobs four or five months after finishing the course. On the other hand, there are real instances of executives who did manage to make the grade. It is a risky proposition, says Ajay Saxena, who has now landed a $10,000 a month job in the US. You have to be careful about the institute you join. It could be a complete con job.
And, in the meanwhile, other hopefuls are putting in 15-hour days, going through three-month long periods of intense study that involves surprise tests, and final examinations. Together, they have already shelled out crores of rupees to make the best of this opportunity. Executives from companies such as ABB, HLL, Wipro GE, Larsen & Toubro and GEC Alsthom; in some cases, general manager and assistant general manager level officers from organisations such as DCM Shriram and Parasrampuria Synthetics have taken the gamble of their lives. It could lead to unimaginable success, or it could lead to complete disaster. The real picture will emerge only in the next six months, says Rahul Jain, a former Delhi-based businessman who gave up his car dealership to join FCS. But till then we will hope for the best.