Teamlease switches to ERP to counter Tally woes

Summary:

For a staffing company, Teamlease’s escalating volumes of business needed scalability and  a basic booking keeping software was proving to be unwieldy. Migrating to Sage Accpac’s ERP solutions helped Teamlease make a smart shift.

Highlights:

Scalability and intergrading of all transactions at line item level have been the greatest gains for Teamlease.Configuring reports that meet Indian statutory requirements of Service tax, TDS has become swift and easy

Reader ROI:

How duplication helps upload large amounts of data from other systemEnhanced integration between payroll and financial systemsHow to improve MIS and analyze your business

The Organization- Teamlease services is a Rs. 700 crore staffing company and with over 650 clients. It operates from 19 geographical locations in India and provides a range of temporary and permanent manpower solutions from establishing a co-employment relationship with clients to undertaking turnkey and recruitment mandates for permanent fulfillment.

Business case – With escalating volumes of growth, Teamlease was finding it difficult to manage data with its outdated booking software. “We were using Tally as our bookkeeping software. Given the rapid growth that we have experienced in the last few years, Tally was periodically breaking down,” explains K. Venkatesan, CFO, Teamlease. 2000 customer invoices and salary journal entries, 60,000 payments per month- the volume was too much for Tally to handle.  Therefore only summary transactions could be entered into the accounting software and multiple excel files had to be managed and reconciled. Further all MIS had to be prepared in excel outside the system.

The project: Realizing it was time for change, Teamlease considered a number of options for upgrade including SAP, Oracle and Navision. Finally, they opted for Sage Accpac ERP because of its ability to handle over 20,000 charts of accounts, 2000 invoices and over 100000 payments.  Teamlease invested in financial modules of general ledger, accounts receivable, accounts payable and Sage Accpac insight-business intelligence and reporting tool. It radically improved reporting funcionalitties across multiple departments in zero downtime, resulting in a much more scalable transaction management system. The switch enhanced integration between payroll and financial systems giving Teamlease a holistic view of their business.

First steps: Teamlease implemented Sage Accpac ERP between January to March 2007, and went live on it on April 1, 2007. They have made an investment of approximately Rs. 15 lakhs. “We faced several challenges while making the shift. As Is and To Be Processes had to be thoroughly reviewed. Master Data had to be collated from multiple sources,” explains K. Venkatesan .There was considerable debate on the change of process. Data that had accumulated on Tally over the years had to be cleaned up, and people had to embrace the new system. Emphasizing on the benefits of the new technology helped the CFO win people over in his team.

“Sage Accpac ERP has helped us to improve our MIS and therefore allowed us to analyze our business more closely”

Benefits: “Sage Accpac ERP has helped us to improve our MIS and therefore allowed us to analyze our business more closely, we are able to upload large volumes of data from other systems, without much duplication of entry” says K.Venkatesan. Scalability and intergrading of all transactions at line item level have been the greatest gains. It has helped Teamlease quicken operations while generating flexible MIS based on SBU. Configuring reports that meet Indian statutory requirements of Service tax, TDS has become swift and easy.