Abstract: In August 2026, Meenakshi Iyer, Chief Transformation Officer of Sarathi Motors Ltd, a four-plant Indian automobile manufacturer, must recommend whether Project DRISHTI should go live as planned. The ₹420 crore programme replaces fragmented legacy systems with a cloud ERP and a production digital twin, promising higher equipment effectiveness, lower inventory and better plan adherence. Twenty-two months in, the project has disrupted business as usual far more than its business case anticipated: plants have lost output while releasing key staff, customisations have crept past policy, master data remains unreliable, and a new central planning structure has triggered resistance from supervisors, planners and a union wary of sensor surveillance. Spending is 15% over plan, and the planned go-live falls in the festive-season demand peak. The case asks students to weigh readiness, disruption and commitment across four options, and to examine how process re-engineering and organisational change determine whether enterprise technology succeeds as much as the software itself.
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Sarathi Motors When the ERP Meets the Assembly Line
Teaching objectives
The case is designed for MBA and executive courses in information systems, operations management, technology management and change management. It enables the instructor to:
- Show that enterprise systems are business transformation programmes, in which most value and most risk sit in process and organisational change rather than in software.
- Illustrate how a large IT project disrupts business as usual, through competition for scarce people, working capital and management attention.
- Examine the trade-off between customising an ERP to existing processes and adopting standard practice, and the hidden long-term costs of customisation.
- Explore how new technologies such as digital twins shift decision rights, and why changes in structure, roles and status trigger resistance.
- Discuss go-live readiness as a business decision that balances scope, cost, time, quality and the business calendar.
- Develop students’ ability to judge project success honestly against functional, financial and timeline objectives.
Learning outcomes
After discussing the case, students should be able to:
- Explain the technology, process and organisational causes of disruption during an ERP and digital twin implementation.
- Analyse quantitative readiness indicators, such as test pass rates, data quality, training coverage and stakeholder support, to assess whether an organisation is ready to go live.
- Evaluate go-live options against functional objectives, budget, timeline and people, and identify the assumptions each option depends on.
- Diagnose sources of resistance among different stakeholder groups and propose targeted change-management interventions, including data-use agreements for sensor-based systems.
- Apply concepts such as business process re-engineering, fit-to-standard design, the iron triangle, Brooks’s law, Lewin’s change model and the post-implementation J-curve to a real-world decision.
- Recommend and defend a course of action to a senior audience, supported by evidence from the exhibits.