Indian food processing company Parle has enhanced business efficiency through the use of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
It has successfully optimised overall IT infrastructure and automated business functions, thus improving sales and revenue.
Parle could make "significant" operational improvements such as increased revenue growth, reduction in time to quote to compare, 80 percent automation in procurement, and 2- 5 percent cost savings in key categories through its procurement management solution in collaboration with IBM.
The IBM solution provided a set of business objects to optimise the interaction with the vendor and the performance throughout the entire procurement lifecycle.
Parle said the “Full Cycle Procurement” helped it understand the current state of the procurement function and identity value drivers.
Parle Products CIO Sanjay Joshi said, "Each phase of procurement – sourcing, purchasing, category management and payment - was closely observed to develop the procurement transformation strategy and optimise KPIs."
Founded in 1929, Parle is one of the country's leading firms for confectionery and biscuits.
Prior to its digital transformation journey, the firm was dealing with complexities in its intricate supply and distribution network because of non-differentiated strategies across products, channels and fulfilment approaches. This resulted in service level constraints and higher costs to serve.
The company leveraged data management architecture - Azure Databricks Lakehouse for better data insights, AI engine for Auto Replenishment and spend management tool - SAP Ariba solutions to manage the entire purchasing process.
Parle's efforts to not only implement newer SAP solutions but migrate the entirety of existing SAP and non-SAP workloads to the cloud has driven "many crucial KPIs and enhanced overall efficiency," Joshi said.
It also implemented a robust SAP-based backbone - SAP Advanced Planning and Optimisation (APO) - to harmonise processes. Joshi said this helped them to reduce overall stockout instances, improving forecast accuracy and making products available to customers much faster.
Parle wanted to design and drive employee performance with technology. It leveraged the cloud-based human resource information system - SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goal management to effectively map the end-to-end performance management process.
"It helped us align employee performance KPIs with company objectives, leading to faster appraisal cycles and transparent performance assessment," he added.
With IBM Consulting, Joshi said the company is poised to unlock many new avenues of growth in future.
