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Tetra comes to India

Specialising in enterprise resource planning solutions for mid-range companies, the company initiated its presence in the city with its flagship product, Tetra CS/3.

T O D A Y

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The standard issue of the product has Indian tax and excise compliance built into it.

It is NT, wide-area network and Web-enabled. It can also work with electronic data interchange systems. This is the 13th country where the 17-year-old company with 1997 revenues of $36.3 million and profits of $4.6 million has a presence.

It also operates through accredited partners in 18 other countries.

The company has five employees and will have a total of about 15 in the next few months. At Madras, it is looking at marketing the CS/3 ancillary units supplying to automobile manufacturers. The company is planning direct mailing and marketing to key persons in these companies followed by meetings once the prospective clients have received sufficient product information.

Tetra's implementation partner in the country is Lovelock & Lewes Services Private Limited who will provide customers with implementation services covering project management, product consultancy, end user training and post-implementation support services.

Paul Byrne, Tetra's vice-president, international, said the CS/3 uses client-server technology and is the fastest-to-implement ERP solution. The company was the first Windows NT/SQL solutions vendor to be appointed as a Microsoft solutions partner.

The strengths of the package, he said, are that it is multi- lingual, multi-currency and could be used for multi-locational implementation. The cost of ownership is lower, he said, and the global implementation ratio, which is the cost of ownership compared to the cost of implementation, is between 1:1 and 1:2 against the 1:4 or 1:5 for this kind of solutions in the industry.

Tetra's niche market is the middle-range manufacturing company, he said, and this is expected to be the fastest growing industry segment.

The major new features that CS/3 had incorporated in the current year, he said, is contract management project ledger, product configuration, vendor analysis and sub-contracting control. One more feature that the package has is a sophisticated pricing and discounting module that would serve the needs of the fast-moving consumer goods segment that is among the targets.

Tetra's major clients worldwide include Deutsche Babcock, 23 of whose offshore facilities (including India) Tetra has contracted to automate, BAT, Bodyshop, DHL Logistics, GE Lighting, Inchcape and Rubbermaid. In the electronics field their clients include Acer, Autodesk, Informix and Motorola Cellular, 31 of whose sites are being worked at by Tetra.