SCG s vice president for corporate affairs, Tanawong Areeratchakul, said the company had signed a contract with SAP (Thailand) to upgrade its ERP project to boost growth domestically and in countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia.
Under the partnership, SCG will implement SAP s ERP integrated products covering a host of areas: accounting, finance, supply-chain management, sales and distribution, customer-relations management, mobile issues, business intelligence, and cloud services to provide products and services.
This will bring the group closer to customers as well as support the company s growth, he said.
SCG began to implement ERP solutions in 1998, with the second phase introduced in 2004. With the new three-year ERP project, the company will implement products covering its five main business areas: chemicals, paper, cement, distribution, and building materials.
SCG will start the latest implementation phase in its chemicals and paper operations, with all five business areas being covered within three years.
Tanawong said the company normally injected about Bt1.2 billion a year for information technology to improve and leverage the capability for future growth. However, he did not disclose the amount being invested in this latest project.
The project will also enable SCG to implement a virtual office, with staff able to access an array of information from their mobile phones, he said.
"The ERP project will increase the productivity of our business and make it easy to connect between offices at home and abroad, which will support our growth," the executive added.
Thomas Conrad Zack, managing director of SAP (Thailand), said the ERP market in Thailand had high growth potential, especially in the oil-and-gas and manufacturing sectors, which would increasingly utilise new technology and innovations to support their businesses.
"I think that SAP can assist SCG to provide a business process for the group domestically and in countries such Vietnam and Indonesia via an end-to-end-platform, which means SCG can drive the new strategy to address the local market very quickly and drive technology like mobility and cloud technology to achieve growth," he said.
Mark Gibbs, chief operating officer of SAP Asia Pacific Japan, said Thailand and the region were good growth markets with further potential for the German company.
SAP will continue to strive to provide best practice and customised solutions to support the market, as the importance of information technology to support business capability grows, he said.
