Coromandel Fertilizers : e-Crop: Coromandel Retail Operations

CFL ventured into the retail business in April 2008 with 20 rural retail

stores in the state of Andhra Pradesh as a pilot run. SAP was the core ERP of

its manufacturing business then and data from the POS application was uploaded

to SAP on regular intervals. However, CFL retail business faced a lot of

challenges in day-to-day routine operations, including: Delay in information

availability on items to service customers; POS Break down in Peak periods; Data

replication from Store to HO and vice a versa; Inefficient Inventory Management;

Statutory requirements at POS leading to manual billing thus leading to higher

customer billing time at POS; Internal controls & audit trail; and Poor MIS.

It decided to expand its rural retail presence and targeted to achieve 300+

retail stores in Andhra Pradesh by March 2009. CFL also decided to get into the

rural lifestyle business. With the above challenges on hand, there was a need

for a retail application which could cater to both Agri Retail as well as

Lifestyle Retail Business. LS Retail and Microsoft Dynamics NAV were implemented

to cover Point of Sales; Stores Back Office; Warehouse Inventory Management;

Purchase; and Finance and other back-end operations at HO. Some of the

challenges faced in this transition included: Change Management for the CFL team

that was from a manufacturing background; challenges in implementing rural

retail processes; statutory requirement compliance; faster roll out of stores;

Integration with SAP on various business areas which meant techno-functional

consultants from Microsoft Dynamics NAV, LS Retail and SAP had to work together.

Post deployment the company now has a retail solution that is an end to end

retail solution catering to Agri as well as lifestyle business requirements;

gives farmer all sorts of information at POS; offers special promotions/schemes

for farmers. However, the most pertinent benefit to farmers is the elimination

of middlemen from the supply chain. The project also strives to ensure that all

that is needed by a rural customer is easily accessible be it products or

services and help him to earn more & increase his standard of living in rural

India.

In future, CFL wants to strengthen its retail presence in rural retail market

aiming to grow to more than 500 stores. The focus will be in the States of

Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra.