WayCool Migrates to SAP 4/HANA in Record 22 Days vis-à-vis Industry Standard of 12 Months
Posted on October 11th, 2023
The continually evolving business and customer needs call for a more agile, cost-efficient, scalable, and secure IT enterprise environment. Full control and transparency over information and real-time insights now drive the governance, monitoring, and proficiency of operations across the spectrum.
WayCool, India’s largest food and agritech platform, works as an interconnected supply chain driver that provides a singular, unified view from soil to sale of agricultural produce. As a startup, WayCool initially used conventional legacy applications that were causing a disrupted information flow, thus adding bottlenecks to evolution and scale. A traditional ERP system meant little to no interconnectivity between different businesses of the company.
As the business evolved and became more complex, WayCool decided to migrate to SAP 4/HANA for seamless integration of all IT applications. Scalability, enhanced margins, better inventory management, and automated controls accrued as some of the immediate benefits of this move.
The business challenge
WayCool’s legacy ERP lacked a finance module, leaving the organization to rely on TALLY for their MIS. While this was manageable for one retail store, it compounded the manual interventions with expansion. Every new retail location required a new ERP and TALLY license that inherently didn’t interconnect with each other. A unified dashboard was missing from the ecosystem, making the company lose out on real-time analysis and actionable insights.
After WayCool diversified to the B2B sector, the company was operating around 30 Distribution Centres (DCs) spread across six states in India. To get a consolidated MIS, the entire information had to go through over 120 manual reconciliations every month. Setting up a new DC translated to adding at least 5 more manual reconciliations to this mix, making the entire exercise labour-intensive and inefficient.
Data transparency was required across diverse verticals to ensure on-time planning and on-demand scalability. To top it all, the pandemic had forced the entire country into lockdown during this time.
The solution
SAP 4/HANA was implemented as the core ERP at 44 plants with three objectives – a modular but interconnected ecosystem, AI-driven embedded analytics, and on-cloud accessibility. Considering the onus placed on a timely and successful deployment, a 40-member team was dedicated exclusively to the task. A collective effort, even with work-from-home, led to the platform going live in just 22 days! While it often takes years to complete a migration of this magnitude, WayCool stabilized its end-to-end SAP 4/HANA deployment within 60-70 days.
Project highlights
- Foundation laid for supply chain efficiency across different business applications
- A completely customizable, unified dashboard acting as a single source of truth for real-time data analysis
- 100+ integrations facilitating 247 unique scenarios undertaken with over 200 training sessions
- 40+ integrations across 5 in-house platforms for end-to-end transparency
- Around 7,000 tickets were raised, addressed, and resolved during the migration
The results
- Multi-dimensional full-stack tech platform: WayCool is now India’s only enterprise in agri-commerce, hosting a robust digital platform, AI-ML enabled decision engines, and expanded services with a peripheral ecosystem.
- Elimination of manual reconciliation: Integration of the in-house platform streamlined the transaction flow and led to 1274 orders being processed per day instead of only 119.
- Enhanced margins: The inclusion of real-time actionable insights from all the locations and consolidated knowledge has resulted in a 3-4% increase in profitability.
- Seamless scalability: With SAP 4/HANA, the end-to-end ERP system for any new plant can now be readied in just 3 days resulting in an unhindered scalability that matches the company’s aggressive growth plans.
- On-demand review of business performance: Automated management for credit, price, and inventory controls have been built on top of SAP 4/HANA for intelligent risk mitigation with a plan to expand to 200+ warehouses in the next two years.
- Blanketed information: The entire company now has complete data transparency through the analytical integrations created with the implementation.
The plan ahead
WayCool is in the second phase of the deployment now with a focus on algorithm-driven automated prioritization and processing of outbound payments. This development is expected to clear more than 2,000 daily disbursements, which had to be done manually earlier. All the bank accounts are planned to be integrated directly into the system, creating a single point of approval.
WayCool has moved from a disconnected ERP system to a platform with the foundation to fulfil the company’s objective of sustainable growth.
Agritech Beyond Being a Trader with an App
Posted on October 11th, 2023
India’s Green Revolution 2.0 is here in the form of agritech that is transforming the country’s agriculture industry. The digitization of our agriculture is already underway. Three significant changes have enabled agri-tech players in the ecosystem:
- Development of in-road infrastructure allowing large trucks to be able to go all the way to the interior farms
- Inexpensive and easily available data
- Digitization of money facilitates instant payments
Agritech does not merely imply using a mobile app to facilitate the trading of agricultural commodities. A true agritech company builds an entire tech-driven ecosystem from ‘soil to sale’.
The agritech landscape in India
The potential for infusing technology in agriculture is enormous and feeding on this are a huge number of startups (around 600-700) dominating the Indian agritech ecosystem.
According to a Ken Research report, the Indian agritech market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32% from FY20 to FY25, with Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Delhi-NCR leading the charge in the country.
With India having a large but fragmented and complex food supply chain, there are a number of problems to solve. Today, there are post-harvest losses of around USD 13 billion in agricultural value which is a wastage of over 40% of food even before it reaches the end consumer. This is driving agritech companies to find new ways to use technology to address the same.
So, what are agritech companies promising? Their goal is to make supply chains efficient in addition to providing better access to agriculture inputs for farmers as also building resilience. They offer technology solutions with buyer-supplier matching as a central function to connect different stakeholders in the value chain. Their integrated value-add services in logistics and warehousing, quality assessment, traceability, and financial services can create a huge impact on farmer incomes.
Big agri companies are also in the race, and are trying to develop their own apps and software platforms. According to an Inc42 report, among all the sub-sectors in agritech, market linkage has the highest potential to reach USD 12 billion by 2025.
The problem of plenty
With so many smart agri solutions in the market, how can our farmers choose the right one?
One of the major challenges is that most agritech platforms focus on solving one aspect of the supply chain, and farmers need cohesive solutions that address the entire production process. They may feel overwhelmed with the many solutions offered and from the need to log in to separate platforms.
Most farmers in India are marginal or small landholding farmers, and hence, may not even be technologically capable of comprehending smart data. These specific challenges require hyperlocal solutions that work in local demands and context.
Another moot point is – how can agritech companies use the data on their apps to help farmers add value to the entire food chain? How can they translate data back to increase production efficiencies on the farm? Farmers don’t just need smartphones; they need smart inputs as well. They need technology support at every stage of the agri value chain from soil to sale, from farm to fork.
As India’s only multidimensional full-stack agri-commerce company, WayCool Foods has a whole gamut of tech interventions that help crop cultivation planning, enhance farm productivity, ensure food traceability, create transparency in pricing, eliminate supply chain inefficiencies and food wastage. These also help manage a cost-effective distribution system so that everyone benefits – farmers get improved returns for their produce, and consumers get fresh and safe food.
The time has come for India’s agritech ecosystem to evolve to the next level, and WayCool is leading this change from the front.