NRC Agro- Vending with IT

The end result of IT is to enable the business and have a positive impact on the bottomline. As we look at various vertcials and look at IT deployment patterns, key trends on many of the critcial parameters emerge. Lets look at how a wholesale vegetable retailer- NRC Agro , which specializes in the supply and export of wide variety of products under the broad category of Fresh Vegetables,Fresh Fruits and Processed Products used IT intervention to an other wise pretty unorganized manual driven sector.

Growth Pangs 

When the company grew rapidly in 1990s and the volume started increasing as well with the addition of each vegetable category. All vegetables for NRC used to arrive in full truck loads and sold on daily basis. Almost 80 MT of vegetables was sourced daily. The number of Suppliers would be 40 to 50 across all vegetables together. Local customers would number in 200 to 250 (including cash and credit). Credit and cash bills had to be raised before 10 AM daily. Since market starts by 2.30 AM daily without any holiday. And Sales realisation to all the suppliers had to be completed by 2 PM. Cash and stock had to tallied by 5 PM daily. Team of 3 cashiers, 5 accountants and 2 supervisors were engaged to deal with this huge volume.

IT Plunge: Humble Beginnings

“In 1991 NRC group was the 3^rd Tally customer in Chennai, buying 2 licensed copies. The Tally version at that time was 3.5 and very soon version 4.5 was deployed. Since then all FA was done on Tally on offline mode. Since all staff were new to computers and software. Since getting trained accounting staff was difficult at that time, at NRC all existing accountants were trained to do Tally FA. All accountants were not highly qualified with not more than schooling as qualification,” quips Ram Mohan, the business owner of NRC Agro. 

Since then the company has come a long way adopting subsequent versions of Tally and significantly upping its operational efficiencies. “From 2007 till Tally.Server 9 could come, speed was a very big issue for us. Since real multi user was not possible since concurrent user accessing the same company was telling upon the speed of accessing due to the volume of data handled, but now with TS 9 speed as also been taken care of,” adds Ram Mohan.

RoI

In 2003 NRC Agro was doing a turnover of Rs.120,000 per day. Over these years the business is now in excess of Rs.9 lakhs per day. Besides a new vertical to distribute frozen vegetables and related products was started in 2007. The beginning was very small with daily turnover being only Rs.25,000. The current turnover in this vertical is Rs.250,000 per day.

After the solution from Tally, its business has grown several times over the years. “The following are very vital for any level of vegetable business Customer, Supplier, Stocks, Cash/Bank Balance, Bills to Pay and Bills to Receive and Profitablity. All these are tallied and analysed on day to day basis. Day end closing for the accounts is much earlier when compared to the manual process 15 years ago. Interesting fact here is that it has trained all its existing staff for input and output on Tally. We have not recruited anyone who are from IT back ground and even who were trained for Tally. Most of the staff are with us for more than 15 to 18 years with us and all are experts in Tally,” says Ram Mohan.

Getting 100% accurate and real-time MIS reports when handling up to 60 tons of vegetables per day was indeed impressive. Reflecting on earlier days, Rammohan remembers how by around 4 PM in the evening they would generate the customization slip. Now, by 9.30 AM everyday they not just have the slip ready but they can print it in all the various formats that their business need-lot wise, day wise, supplier or commodity wise. Tally.Server 9 on the other hand has helped the business capture 50% more volume of data in the same amount of time from 2.30am to 8.am. They also benefit by tracking their customers and suppliers bill-wise in all areas.

At the end of the day, here is one small enterprise that has arrived at seamless operation by judicious use of IT in its operations