IBM has announced the expansion of its collaboration with biscuit brand Parle Products Pvt. to further the company’s digital transformation journey.
By deploying cloud and artificial intelligence for business solutions through the course of the association, Parle was able to reduce sourcing cost, enhance sales forecast accuracy, lower the cost to serve and optimise overall IT infrastructure, the company said.
Prior to the association with IBM in 2014, Parle was facing complexities in its supply and distribution network because of non-differentiated strategies across products as well as channel and fulfillment approaches.
This resulted in service-level constraints and higher cost to serve. Parle has since been able to bring operational efficiencies by leveraging the cloud and AI capabilities of IBM Consulting.
"Our joint 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," said Sanjay Joshi, chief information officer at Parle Products.
IBM Consulting is also working with Microsoft to implement the Azure Databricks Lakehouse, AI engine for Auto Replenishment, and SAP Ariba solutions at Parle. Through data insights using the Azure platform, IBM Consulting is helping Parle achieve operational resilience, agility, and scalability.
“The similar collaboration on deploying Microsoft Azure Databricks Lakehouse platform will definitely provide our business functions with data-driven insights and help them take critical decisions,” Joshi said.
Parle additionally used IBM's security and industry knowledge to drive growth during the various phases of the association.
The enterprise-wide changes at Parle include a variety of business functions :
* Procurement : IBM’s Full Cycle Procurement solution helped Parle understand the current state of the procurement function and identity value drivers. The new procurement strategy resulted in operational improvements such as increased revenue growth and cost optimisation. According to IBM, there was an 80% reduction in time to quote to compare, 80% automation in operational procurement, and 2–5% savings across key categories.
* Supply Chain : IBM deployed the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimisation platform for process integration at Parle, helping reduce overall stockout instances while optimising the logistics cost to serve. According to IBM, this resulted in improvement in forecast accuracy by 10% and reduction in weighted average distance by 10%, making availability of products to customers faster.
* Human Resources : The implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Performance and Goal management, along with Employee Central helped Parle map the end-to-end performance management process. This helped align employees’ key performance indicators with company objectives, leading to faster appraisal cycles and transparent performance assessment, IBM said.
“Our long-standing collaboration with Parle has reached another milestone, where a fundamental shift is being brought to the core strategic units of the organisation. Collectively, this is resulting in improved operations and increased revenue, helping them better serve customers,” said Kamal Singhani, country managing partner at IBM Consulting, India-South Asia.
