CarDekho: How a Digital-First Enterprise Reimagined Its Finance Core

When Aditya Changoiwala, Group Financial Controller at CarDekho, stepped into his role, the company was already in the midst of a major ERP transformation. With Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite at the core, his mandate was to lead the deployment and ensure it delivered scalability, operational discipline, and strategic value across the group’s complex finance landscape.

In this exclusive Q&A with CiOL, Aditya takes us inside the transformation journey—from change management challenges and phased rollouts to faster closings and data-driven decision-making. Excerpts.

What triggered the ERP transformation at CarDekho, and why Oracle?

The decision to adopt Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, which includes Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP had been made, and my mandate was clear: lead the implementation and ensure it delivered scale, agility, and strategic value across CarDekho’s massive financial operations.

To give a context, as one of India’s leading auto-tech platforms, CarDekho has seen exponential growth over the last decade. However, with scale comes complexity. Disparate financial systems, manual processes, and limited visibility across business units were slowing down decision-making and introducing inefficiencies.

Looking at the evaluation process, it spanned six months with leading vendors in the fray. Ultimately, Oracle won both in terms of functionality and cost. The interlinked modules, the holistic cloud-native architecture, and the overall deal structure tilted the scale in favour of Oracle. The company also felt that for a digital services company like CarDekho, Oracle offered a more integrated, service-oriented suite compared to others traditionally preferred by manufacturing firms.

What were the biggest challenges in deploying Oracle ERP across a complex group like CarDekho?

An enterprise deployment of this scale is rarely friction free. In this case, the biggest hurdle was change management. CarDekho has multiple autonomous business units, each with legacy processes. It was difficult to align everyone on the same page with the new unified system. Many teams had their own ways of doing things and were reluctant to change, but we overcame all these issues. Data migration was another major pain point. With multiple entities and high data volume, migrating clean, accurate data was essential. One mistake and the outputs would be flawed.

What has been the rollout strategy and current status of the Oracle implementation?

CarDekho opted for a spectrum of Oracle deployment: ERP, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Human Capital Management (HCM). While ERP went live first, and is currently in stabilisation, EPM is expected to go live soon, while HCM is in early planning stages. We initially thought we could go live with all modules in 9 to 12 months. But we soon realised a phased rollout made more sense for a group of our complexity.

How has the finance function evolved post-Oracle, and what metrics are you targeting?

With ERP in place, we are now closing monthly books by workday 7, down from 15+ days pre-Oracle. Eventually, we want to hit a day 3 or day 4 closing window. We’re targeting day 6 for leadership MIS distribution. It’s ambitious but achievable with the right tooling. Beyond speed, CarDekho wants Oracle to become the digital engine for data-driven decision-making and producing actionable dashboards and forecasts with agility.

What advice do you have for CIOs and CFOs embarking on a similar transformation journey?

My playbook for a successful ERP transformation begins with a clear definition of success metrics, don’t start without knowing what success looks like, as misalignment leads to mismatched expectations. I would recommend a top-down approach, this is crucial, where final system design decisions must be made at the leadership level to set a strong foundation. Planning the data migration strategy early is also critical, especially in a complex environment. Additionally, the need to prioritise training both before and after go-live to ensure seamless adoption and unlock full value is vital. Add to it, a strong governance and leadership buy-in. In our case the transformation was guided by a structure that included monthly 'Steering Committee' meetings chaired by CEO with all the key stakeholders.