Parle Products has Joined Forces with IBM to Accelerate Digital Transformation using Cloud and AI

IBM has announced an expansion of its partnership with Parle Products, India's leading biscuit brand, aimed at advancing the company's digital transformation efforts. By integrating cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) into its business solutions. Parle has successfully reduced sourcing costs, improved sales forecast accuracy, lowered its cost-to-serve metrics, and optimized its overall IT infrastructure.

Before embarking on this transformative journey, Parle faced challenges within its intricate supply and distribution network, primarily due to non-differentiated strategies across products, channels, and fulfillment approaches. This led to constraints in service levels and increased costs. Since joining forces with IBM in 2014, Parle has achieved operational efficiencies by harnessing IBM Consulting's cloud and AI capabilities.

In the recent stage of their collaboration, IBM Consulting has also partnered with Microsoft to introduce Azure Databricks Lakehouse, an AI engine for Auto Replenishment, and SAP Ariba solutions into Parle's operations. This strategic move aims to enhance Parle's utilization of the Azure platform for data insights, further reinforcing the company's operational resilience, agility, and scalability with the assistance of IBM Consulting.

, "Parle’s nearly decade-long collaboration with IBM, leveraging both its technology expertise and consulting capabilities, has been paved with multiple milestones, all of which have helped us achieve our digital transformation vision. Our joint efforts to not only implement newer SAP solutions but migrate the entirety of existing SAP and non-SAP workloads to the cloud have driven many crucial KPIs and enhanced overall efficiency. A 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. With IBM Consulting, we are poised to unlock newer avenues of growth and remain at the forefront of industry evolution," said Sanjay Joshi, CIO, of Parle Products.

“Today, leveraging exponential technologies like cloud and AI are fundamental to every company’s competitiveness by transforming the way that they meet customer demands and operate their businesses. Our long-standing collaboration with Parle has reached another milestone where a fundamental shift is being brought to the core strategic units of the organization. Collectively, this is resulting in improved operations and increased revenue, helping them better serve customers,” said Kamal Singhani, Country Managing Partner, IBM Consulting.

Throughout the various phases of the collaboration, Parle also made effective use of IBM's industry-leading security and expertise to drive its growth. The comprehensive transformation initiative at Parle has revamped its operations, encompassing a wide range of business functions, including:

• Procurement Transformation:- With the help of IBM's "Full Cycle Procurement" solution, Parle gained insights into the current state of its procurement function and identified key value drivers. Every aspect of procurement, from sourcing and purchasing to category management and payment, underwent careful scrutiny to formulate a procurement transformation strategy and optimize key performance indicators (KPIs). This strategic approach resulted into significant operational improvements, such as increased revenue growth and cost optimization. The notable achievements include an 80% reduction in the time required for quote comparisons, an 80% increase in automation in operational procurement, and savings ranging from 2-5% across critical categories.

• Evolving the Supply Chain:- In close collaboration with Parle's teams, IBM executed the deployment of a robust SAP-based foundation - SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) - to streamline operations. This move led to a reduction in instances of stockouts while optimizing logistics costs. The outcome was a remarkable improvement of forecast accuracy by 10% and a 10% reduction in the weighted average distance, resulting in accelerated product availability for customers.

• Human Resources Transformation:- Parle's primary focus was on defining and enhancing employee performance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The integration of SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goal Management, along with Employee Central, efficiently mapped out the end-to-end performance management process. These initiatives successfully aligned employee performance KPIs with the company's objectives, ultimately leading to faster appraisal cycles and a more transparent performance assessment process.