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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

1. Foundation laid for supply chain efficiency across different business applications
2. A completely customizable, unified dashboard acting as a single source of truth for real-time data analysis
3. 100+ integrations facilitating 247 unique scenarios undertaken with over 200 training sessions
4. 40+ integrations across 5 in-house platforms for end-to-end transparency
5. 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.