Adopting a cloud-first architecture empowers Birla Opus Paints to scale in line with its ambitious growth trajectory, targeting 3x expansion year-on-year, while enhancing visibility, responsiveness, and operational precision.
(Source:adityabirla.com)
SAP announced Birla Opus Paints has established a comprehensive digital foundation powered by SAP’s integrated suite of cloud solutions. This digital core now drives end-to-end operations across planning, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, finance, and customer engagement.
The transformation, anchored on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and complemented by SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), SAP Commerce, SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM), SAP Vistex, and SAP Vendor Invoice Management (VIM), delivers a unified digital backbone across finance, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, and dealer management.
Adopting a cloud-first architecture empowers Birla Opus Paints to scale in line with its ambitious growth trajectory, targeting 3x expansion year-on-year, while enhancing visibility, responsiveness, and operational precision.
“We have traversed our digital journey with the customer at the epicentre, ensuring every process, platform, and insight works toward delivering a seamless experience right from our inception. With SAP’s unified cloud suite, we have created an integrated backbone that brings precision, transparency, and agility to our operations. This implementation not only strengthens how we run our business today but also equips us to scale 3x year after year with confidence,” said Girish Rao, Head – IT, Birla Opus Paints.
Three Pillars of Birla Opus Paints’ Digital Strategy
Customer-Centric Innovation: Transformation designed with the customer at the center around speed, scale, and real-time visibility. SAP enabled a fully digitized value chain—from procurement and production to distribution and finance.
Industry and Societal Impact: Strengthening India’s paint and coatings ecosystem with improved supply chain reliability, dealer experience, and nationwide product availability across 40,000+ dealers, six manufacturing plants, and 150 depots.
Differentiated Speed and Scale: Achieved a full-stack, cloud-driven enterprise in approximately two years, compared to decades-long industry norms.
“Birla Opus Paints represents the new generation of Indian enterprises that are born digital and built for scale. Their rapid end-to-end transformation reflects the power of SAP’s cloud strategy in helping customers run with speed, intelligence, and resilience. We are proud to support their journey as they shape the future of India’s paints industry,” said Kulwant Singh, Vice President, Enterprise sales, SAP India.
Speaking to FE CIO, Rao, touching upon how the SAP cloud suite enables application layer integration across its six plants, said, “There are two primary perspectives for integration. First, there's local integration, meaning the integration of processes within a single plant. Second, there's integration across all our plants to provide a central overview.
The third aspect of integration is through our application layer, specifically SAP. This system, hosted on the cloud, handles all material accounting and warehouse management, standardizing these functions across all plants. So, to summarize, we have three layers of integration: process level within each plant, process overview across all plants, and an application layer (SAP) that controls processes across all the six plants.”
IT/OT Integration
IT/OT integration operates from two perspectives. One is the application perspective, where systems like SAP exist. The OT layer and the application layer communicate to generate the various documents required for material movement within the plant.
“To be specific, all our mechanical processes are Industry 4.0 compliant. This means every activity, from material inwards, processing across the plant (both raw and packing material), storage, consumption tracking, and finished goods storage right up to dispatch, is controlled through various sensors, SCADA, and PLC devices. These devices continuously feed real-time information about material status. This data then culminates in our MES (Manufacturing Execution System), which in turn creates data in SAP to account for production and material movement. So, the entire process is thoroughly integrated and IT/OT enabled,” said Rao.
Traditionally in other companies, SAP and other servers would be housed within the plants to minimize production loss due to server unavailability, as infrastructure used to be a major challenge. “By implementing three levels of backup, we've ensured near 100% availability of our servers at the plant. We hold no application-related data or servers physically at the plant; all such information is centrally located on the cloud. The servers present at the plant are solely for OT and OT-related devices. This greenfield approach gave us a significant advantage,” explained Rao.
Key Outcomes of the Transformation
Unified financial and operational planning for strategic alignment
Real-time visibility to detect and resolve bottlenecks quickly
Data-driven decision-making replacing manual forecasting
Accelerated operations across procurement, warehouse management, pricing, and accounts payable
Scalable growth with a pay-as-you-grow cloud model
Daily operations run on SAP S/4HANA Cloud for core ERP, SAP IBP for integrated planning, SAP EWM for automated logistics, SAP Vistex for pricing and incentives, SAP VIM for AP automation, and SAP Commerce for digital dealer engagement—supporting six Industry 4.0 plants, 150 depots, and 40,000+ dealers.
By leveraging a unified digital architecture, Birla Opus Paints is poised to drive continuous improvement, operational agility, and data-driven decision-making across its expanding business landscape.
Empower your business. Get practical tips, market insights, and growth strategies delivered to your inbox
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy & Terms & Conditions
