Auto major Mahindra & Mahindra is among the first few to adopt the technology. The company has achieved 30 per cent cost reduction, while increasing turnover by eight per cent, said industry sources. The Mahindra site is the world's largest Windows NT and SAP site.Sources said Ranbaxy and Indian Oil Corporation, among others, are among those planning to tap the benefits of ERP implementation.ERP is a total software application providing integrated information system solutiuons to the enterprise. An ERP solution covers all functions like human resources, corporate finance, production planning and control, materials management and the sales & distribution function.

In short, it controls the whole nervous system of an enterprise. Today some ERP products even cover thevendor/customer extended supply chain management. It thus enables management to maintain better control over the company.Ranbaxy is planning ERP across continents for better management of its worldwide operations. The company will interlink its plants in an effort to balance operations spread across the length and breadth of the globe.Indian Oil Corporation Ltd is exploring the possibility of implementing ERP across its refineries.

"The market for ERP in India has vast potential," said Rotnoroj Dutta market development manager who claimed that nearly 38 sites were Hewlett Packard (HP) out of the total of 48 ERP sites in the country.He added that HP servers have delivered the highest performance on SAP and BAAN software packages, which are two of the leading ERP applications in India. HP servers have registered a performance of 1670 SAP SD users and 2376 Baan reference users, which is the highest in the world on Intel servers.According to Dutta, HP has further consolidated its leadership position in thismarket by announcing world beating benchmark performance results. In recently conducted tests by independent organisations like the Transaction Processing Council, HP servers (16,257 tpmc at $33.67/tpmc) outperformed Compaq's highest end servers by more than 40 per cent at a lower cost.