For Vedanta Aluminum and Power, it’s all about “firsts” and “foremosts.” Already this year, Vedanta is on track to reaching a major corporate milestone – deploying one of the largest fleets of lithium-ion battery-powered electric forklifts in India. In doing so, Vedanta becomes the first in the Indian aluminum industry to accomplish such a feat.
In 2021, the company became the foremost purchaser of green power in India by acquiring more than 350 million units of renewable energy. This is significant. The purchase of green power has enabled Vedanta and other sustainability-oriented organizations to achieve their carbon-mitigation targets while producing “green,” value-added products.
Setting a Foundation for Growth with Intelligent Technology
Vedanta, a Mumbai-based company, is one of the world’s leading mining companies and is India’s largest aluminum producer, exporting its products to approximately 35 countries globally.
Its aluminum – or “metal of the future” as it likes to refer to it – is used in critical applications by key industries such as automotive, aerospace, defense, transportation, construction, and more.
The company is also one of the largest captive power generators in India, supplying power to its aluminum smelters.
But as successful as Vedanta is today, the company still aims to become a future-ready intelligent enterprise. Though the company had been using SAP solutions for the last dozen years or so, Vedanta’s current enterprise resource planning (ERP) software was unable to keep pace with growing digitalization requirements due to the company’s business growth and its ever-increasing complexity and customization.
Boosting Its Growth Trajectory
The company understood it needed to get past its own internal kink in the aluminum, so to speak, to bring agility, flexibility, and responsiveness in how it operated as a business.
And to get there, Vedanta needed to unify master data for an integrated 360-degree view into the aluminum sector, which includes the power plant previously mentioned, plus other manufacturing units, refineries, and mines.
A Sustainable Partnership
Vedanta found the right partner in SAP to create a multi-year program to become an intelligent enterprise in order to help achieve its ambitious goals.
SAP began by creating an intelligent enterprise road map for the next three years after taking a deep-dive look into Vedanta’s current deployment. SAP also helped bolster Vedanta’s strength in metals and mining industry sectors supported by best practice examples. Finally, SAP worked with the company to set foundations for innovation to enable reimagined business processes and a future IT strategy.
This ultimately resulted in one of the largest transformational deployments in the metals industry.
In a nutshell, what Vedanta did was undertake an SAP S/4HANA greenfield deployment and use additional SAP solutions, namely SAP Ariba solutions, for supplier onboarding, sourcing, and performance management, among other tasks.
“Adopting SAP S/4HANA is an important step toward this transformation that provides real-time analytics for enterprise-wide business insights, thus aiding agile monitoring and decision-making,” said Rahul Sharma, CEO of Vedanta Aluminum.
A Happy Outcome for All
According to Anup Agarwal, CFO of Vedanta Aluminum, “Our intelligent enterprise journey with SAP has helped us transform our finance processes. We now have even more robust business processes and enhanced governance across the entire business – no mean feat given the complexity of our operation.”
For its accomplishments, Vedanta Aluminum was named a 2021 SAP Innovation Award finalist in the Business Transformation Initiative category. You can read more about its accomplishments in this pitch deck.
Michael Kure is an SAP Global Marketing contributor.