The economic progress in India and the subsequent increase in purchasing power have led to the tremendous growth of the Indian real estate market. Despite a brief lull in growth during the pandemic, the industry has bounced back and is currently well on its way to achieving one trillion in market size by 2030.

The future will see the demand for a suitable place to conduct business or living space increase, particularly as access and infrastructure improve in various parts of the country. So, the question that should be on every real estate developer’s mind is how prepared they are for the future.

Turning real estate around with technology

For VTP Realty, that question was the starting point of their transformation journey. With a rich group legacy in construction for over 36 years, this Pune’s top real estate developer was at a stage where they urgently needed to fix operational issues within their ERP system to handle the exponential growth the brand was achieving year after year.  They were adding a large number of customers rapidly. Their ambition was to be within the country’s top 5 developers with sales revenue and their old systems weren’t built to support such a large volume of transactions and operations.

The aim was to reduce errors, improve and enhance business processes and build cost efficiencies. For this, automation of project management activities such as contracting, estimation, procurement, costing, among many others, became paramount.

The real estate brand need a much higher degree of analysis for better decision making with higher control and accurate data. In a strategic move that would help them gain end-to-end visibility of customers, VTP Realty adopted Salesforce CRM, which needed to be integrated with SAP so that users did not have to enter the same information multiple times in multiple systems.

“We knew we needed an end-to-end robust system and decided to implement the SAP S/4HANA platform to accomplish all this and thus began our search for a partner who could help us with the transformation. We wanted to strengthen our business foundation with standardization and automation of processes, reduction in errors, function more systematically and add a higher degree of control on our operations, thus ensuring our growth was more robust and sustained. We were ready to take the big leap and we called the mission V-Transform”, stated Mr. Sachin Bhandari, Executive Director and CEO of VTP Realty.

Partnering for future growth

The search for a trusted partner brought VTP Realty to IBM Consulting, which has a storied history of working with clients on SAP implementation projects. As the real estate developer began the discussions, IBM’s expertise in SAP and in-depth knowledge of the real estate industry became apparent, making them an obvious choice for the SAP implementation.

“Our expertise stems from working with real estate clients across India on multiple SAP implementations, including SAP and CRM integrations. We have a strong team of knowledgeable consultants who can speak the real estate language fluently”, explains Mr. Devang Sheth, Account Partner - Industrial Sector, IBM Consulting.

During brainstorming sessions with VTP Realty, IBM consultants outlined various processes and applications being implemented in some of the top organizations in the country, which included showcases for a quantity control system, billing aimed at helping VTP Realty become faster and more efficient. VTP also demanded several other features like channel partner accounting, floor-level quantity controls and enhancements on control mechanisms to reduce errors across all functions. The IBM team had one more ace up their sleeves – assets developed around SAP that could help reduce the time to implement and deploy solutions for the real estate market.

Stepping stone to building a competitive edge

The IBM team quickly got to work on implementing on RISE with SAP and worked on integrating SAP S/4HANA with Salesforce CRM. The project went live on 6th July 2023, with the team leveraging world-class practices for real estate industry at every stage, from design, development, testing, and validation to delivering agreed-upon outcomes. “The migration to SAP S/4HANA has been a major milestone in our transformation journey, and it has given us an edge as we compete in this digital era. And together, VTP and IBM have been able to derive so much more from SAP which in itself is a big achievement and has given us a greater degree of exposure and learning in the real estate domain.” says explains Mr. Sheth.

The implementation included activation of various Fiori apps, which enabled anytime and anywhere access to the ERP system that vastly improved the user experience.  The days of disjointed data and systems are in the past, as VTP Realty can now get a complete and integrated view of all projects, procurement processes, sales, and accounts. Additionally, with the CRM and SAP integration firmly in place, every customer data gets entered only once, avoiding duplication and potential errors.

VTP Realty has now attained a robust, scalable, and digitally-enabled platform that forms the base for future growth strategies with just a single instance of SAP S/4HANA deployed across departments and functions. The platform has enhanced business processes and now supports host-to-host and API-based payment methods for vendors, streamlined approval processes, and created a seamless data flow for real-time statutory and MIS reporting.

Empowered with the new capabilities unlocked by IBM and SAP, VTP Realty is all set to transform the real estate industry with much higher benchmarks.