At its 44th Annual General Meeting (AGM), Century Plyboards (CPIL) outlined an ambition to achieve Rs 12,000 crore in revenue by FY31, up from Rs 4,528 crore in FY25. The 2.6x scale-up over six years is built on five strategic pillars: capacity expansion, AI-led R&D and innovation, sustainability, digital and distribution growth, and premium and B2B expansion.
An ambition of that scale cannot operate on a 15-year-old ERP platform. It needs a digital core that is real-time, AI-first, cloud-ready, and decision-grade. That, the company said, is precisely what its SAP S/4HANA go-live on April 6, 2026 was designed to deliver.
The implementation, which kicked off on April 10, 2025, went live on April 6, 2026 — marking a 12-month journey from project initiation to a big-bang go-live, ““We believe this is among the fastest timelines in India for an SAP S/4HANA implementation of comparable scope and complexity,” said Dr Sandip Pradhan, Chief Digital & Information Officer. The deployment spans five company codes, eight factories, 33 branches, 48 warehouses and the head office — all on SAP S/4HANA from Day 1.
AI-First
Century Plyboards’ S/4HANA environment was designed as an AI-first platform, not a traditional ERP with AI layered on later.
The AI first features include SAP Joule, SAP's native generative AI copilot, embedded into the user experience for natural-language interaction and intelligent navigation. SAP’s native AI and machine learning capabilities across finance, supply chain and sales processes have been integrated into the platform.
Century Plyboards’ innovation layer for side-by-side extensions, intelligent integrations and future AI use cases are fully aligned with SAP's clean core philosophy. For granular cost visibility in material ledger (ML), real-time actual costing with multi-level valuation has been enabled.
This positions CPIL to progressively adopt predictive, generative and agentic SAP Business AI use cases on a platform designed for such workloads.
Alignment With Vision 2031
The hardest part of any transformation is never the technology — it is the alignment. CPIL is a 36-year-old market leader that has run on SAP since 2008. The organisation had deep operational muscle memory on ERP central component (ECC), and the case for change had to be made in the language of Vision 2031 outcomes, not SAP modules.
However, the transformation journey involved significant alignment challenges. “We chose a big bang go-live with advanced capabilities rather than a conservative brownfield conversion. Earning leadership conviction for that choice, within a 12-month delivery window, was a defining moment of the program. What made it possible was uncompromising sponsorship from the very top of the organisation, and a transformation mandate that was clear on Day 1 and stayed clear on Day 365,” said Pradhan.
For an enterprise that has operated on SAP since 2008, the data estate was both its biggest asset and its most complex workstream. The principal data management challenges were master data harmonisation across 8 factories and 33 branches — particularly material, vendor and customer masters, where years of local variations had to be rationalised into a single, governed model; Legacy custom code rationalisation involved disciplined decisions on what to retain, refactor or retire, in line with a clean core philosophy; the dealer scheme data migration exercise, which involved years of complex, condition-based incentive structures into condition contract management demanded unusually close business-SAP collaboration.
Another major challenge was maintaining integration continuity while consolidating data from disparate systems — synchronising data across 12+ non-SAP systems through BTP-led integration, with careful mapping and reconciliation for every cutover dependency. “We invested heavily in profiling, cleansing, multiple mock loads and full-scale dress rehearsals. That investment is the single biggest reason the go-live was stable from Day 1 — and the reason we were able to hold a 12-month timeline on a program of this complexity,” said Pradhan.
An Always-On Approach
Manufacturing and supply chains cannot stop. Since manufacturing operations had to continue alongside the SAP S/4HANA implementation, operational risks had to be carefully mitigated. That principle governed every execution decision during the project.
Our risk-mitigation framework rested on five pillars:
- A tightly engineered cutover window, with an hour-by-hour runbook and pre-defined rollback checkpoints.
- Multiple mock cutovers, each progressively closer to production scale, so that the final weekend held no surprises.
- An integrated war room combining our Implementation Partner — the SAP CoE team — its support partner Surflex Technology, along with internal IT, SAP, infrastructure and security teams, and business process owners from every function.
- Plant-level and branch-level readiness champions, trained in advance to support users on Day 1.
- End-to-end integration testing with all 12+ non-SAP systems, via BTP / CPI, simulating real transaction flows before the final switch.
“The outcome was unambiguous: plant operations, dispatches, procurement, finance postings and the entire dealer scheme all ran on S/4HANA from Day 1 — across all 5 company codes, 8 factories, 33 branches, 48 warehouses and HO,” said Pradhan.
Post-Implementation Adoption and Value Realisation
The company is currently a month into the hyper-care phase. But adoption has been a deliberate design priority, not an afterthought. The immediate focus is helping users transition from SAP GUI-based workflows to a Fiori-first experience — addressed through role-based Fiori launchpads designed for intuitive, daily use; embedding new processes such as CCM and material ledger-based actual costing into the rhythm of daily business; building trust in real-time analytics by helping users who grew up on day-old reports adjust to making decisions on Fiori-based, live reporting.
“Our adoption strategy rests on three pillars — continuous floor-walking and in-person hyper-care support, a dedicated power-user enablement programme across MM, PP, SD, FI-CO, PM and QM, and a structured feedback loop that feeds directly into our post-go-live backlog,” said Pradhan.
Future Roadmap
CPIL’s philosophy is that go-live marks the beginning of the transformation, not its conclusion. The system is built, but the transformation has just begun and every post-go-live decision is measured against Vision 2031.
“Our roadmap is anchored on three commitments: Progressive AI adoption, building on Joule and Embedded AI with additional SAP Business AI use cases across demand forecasting, procurement intelligence, quality prediction, and financial close automation. The company also plans to track the share of business transactions executed on Fiori versus classic transactions as a formal KPI to measure UX maturity and adoption. Continuous value realisation, which involves shifting our success metrics from ‘uptime and stability’ to ‘decision velocity, process cycle time, and data-driven outcomes’”, said Pradhan.
