DeHaat, a technology-driven platform, offering end-to-end agricultural services to farmers in India, has tied up with German enterprise software major SAP to enhance its business transformation journey.
Founded in 2012, DeHaat uses AI-enabled technologies to improve its customers' supply chain and production efficiency in India’s farm sector.
In December last year, the company raised US$60 million (S$79 million) in Series E funding with Temasek and Sofina Ventures co-leading the round along with participation from existing backers RTP Global Partners, Prosus Ventures and Lightrock India.
Prior to its tie-up with SAP, DeHaat was using an open-source ERP solution. However, after evaluating its expanding requirements, the company decided to go with SAP.
DeHaat will deploy SAP’s cloud platform, Rise with SAP, to optimise reporting, business, and finance operations, improve data security, and meet globally accepted audit and compliance requirements, the company said.
Specifically, DeHaat, will use SAP’s cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution S/4HANA Cloud.
This will provide DeHaat with real-time data, statistics, and analytics on different business verticals, including financials, accounting, sales, vendor management, and customer relationship management (CRM).
DeHaat’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, Shyam Sundar Singh told iTnews Asia that the company is using the new capabilities provided by SAP to create programmable APIs to better manage its supply chain.
“The DeHaat team has integrated these APIs with custom user interfaces for different supply chain users, and other business functions,” Singh said.
Roadblocks
Singh added that before its engagement with SAP, DeHaat’s in-house technology teams were managing diverse applications and manually inputting information into the system.
Hence, “integrating these applications” to streamline business and finance operations and “reduce the manual efforts” of managing multiple standalone solutions were the challenges, Singh said.
Moreover, the organisation wanted to “adopt global best practices” in terms of corporate governance and audit and improve both the reporting as well as security of its data.
DeHaat is using SAP’s cloud-based ERP to “streamline reporting” by consolidating processes across finance and business operations, and this is leading to better governance and compliance with a visible audit trail, Singh said.
He said with SAP the company’s governance, compliance audit trail and data management have become more streamlined and this helps to “build confidence” among the investor community.
“It is also now easier to control the business operation to gain visibility with real-time reporting of financials, sales teams’ purchase operations, commercials, stocks, and inventories,” Singh said.
Easing day-to-day operations
Currently, the company serves a farmer base of 1.3 million and also has 11,000 channel partners.
Going forward it is looking to serve more than 10 million farmers in the next five years in India, he added.
With a streamlined and consolidated process across finance and business operation, the internal teams have much better tools and technologies to operate on a day-to-day basis, Singh said.
The company also has plans to expand its global footprint and provide other services such as crop insurance and lending and it plans to leverage the better visibility of its data that it now has, Singh said.
