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Sudesh Prasad
Tropicana Beverages Company has sales and distribution network spread across four regional offices and 225 distributors. The company has an annual turnover Rs 150 crore with production facilities located in Baramati and Aurangabad. The company was depending on manual mode by logging all orders telephonically with the regional offices, which made the system inefficient. The financial entries were recorded and reconciled on a monthly basis which resulted in unnecessary delays in logging of orders, invoice generation and dispatches. All these led to delayed reporting to the head office and the absence of tracking and monitoring of new marketing schemes which acted as a hurdle in planning deliveries resulting in excessive freight costs.
The company was also concerned for security as SAP was being opened up for remote users for the first time and also that certain SAP modules do not support high latency.
In light of the above problems and challenges, it approached Tata Teleserviecs for their RoadWarrior Data solution. A POC was thereby conducted using ISDN BRI as the last mile connectivity. The commercial deployment was subsequently done using leased line as the last mile connectivity. Users were remotely able to access their SAP application through a Citrix Client.
A combination of dedicated originating IDs and terminating IPs were configured on the Tata Indicom shared network in order to provide secure connectivity to remote users.
Unified connectivity to the central SAP application was provided to C&F agents present across the country. This resulted in online order entry mechanism which saved time taken for order entry, invoice generation and dispatches. This also led to real time reporting at the corporate office and various levels of Tropicana SCM. The solution has helped Tropicana evaluate the effectiveness on new schemes/marketing initiatives.
At a Glance
Issue: Connect remote users spread across 16 locations
Reason: Wanted to replace inefficient manual handling which was done telephonically
Solution/Provider: RoadWarrior Data solution/Tata Teleservices
Benefits:
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Unified connectivity to the central SAP application for C&F agents across the country
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Online order entry
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Real time reporting at corporate office and various levels of Tropicana SCM
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Improved effectiveness on new schemes/marketing initiatives
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Cost savings on deliveries
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Source: Dataquest
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