BackTransformation Stories - WayCool Group: Paving the path for human led, tech-enabled transformation
Mint’s Transformation Stories, presented by PwC India, takes you through the journey of WayCool Group from the point of view of its top leadership, who have envisaged this transformation and redefined their business experience
PremiumIn this transformation story, we talk about WayCool Foods and Products Private Limited, which has emerged as one of the major players in the agritech industry. WayCool aims aim to handle 1% of the world’s food demand by redefining its value chain using the power of technology. The company also wants to leverage technology to tackle one of the biggest issues the country is facing – food wastage due to mismatched demand and supply. WayCool aims to take this to single digit figures, against the current industry standard of 18%. Mint’s Transformation Stories, presented by PwC India, takes you through the journey of WayCool Group from the point of view of its top leadership, who have envisaged this transformation and redefined their business experience.
Leveraging technology to create distinctiveness
Technological innovations in the agriculture sector have been scattered. ‘This entire space is divided into three pieces – demand side, supply side and a very important piece that marries these two. At WayCool, we chose to invest in that one important piece – demand planning. We have built a suite of about 60 tech applications that marry all these pieces into one, starting from sourcing or supply side to demand side and heavy artificial intelligence (AI)- and machine learning (ML)-driven demand planning tools, so that the information flows in real-time bridging the gap between demand and supply,’ said Chinna Pardha Saradhi, Chief Financial Officer of WayCool Group.
‘Today, all the investments that we have made in technology are helping us to scale significantly into areas and categories that we are choosing. We are very confident that we are on the right track with the technology platform helping us to reach our vision of catering to 1% of global food,’ he said.
The transformation story
After its inception, WayCool was growing at a rapid pace and the senior leadership felt a need to relook their internal processes and operating model to assess if they were right for them to scale as they transitioned into the next phase of the company’s growth. PwC India engaged with WayCool and initiated a programme called ‘Project Concorde’ to transform WayCool’s processes and enable them to take the next big leap.
‘What we did in Project Concorde was to look at key focus areas which were fundamental to the business – like order to cash and procure to pay. We also looked at how we build capabilities from an organisational and people capability perspective. When we started the project, we looked at three distinct pillars of Project Concorde – scalable digital design, controlled process execution, and intuitive user experience,’ said Gaurav Agarwal, Partner, Finance Transformation, PwC India, who has been actively engaged with WayCool for the last 12 months.
As the project kicked off, the team of specialists from PwC India identified key initiatives which were at the heart of driving business for WayCool. Some of these initiatives included enhancing digital payments from the customer to reduce the reliance on cash collections, using technology to improve the profile of the customers and vendors and enforce KYC processes in their vendor workflows, looking at beat plan adherence and improving the productivity of the sales force. PwC India’s team also looked at people enablement training by establishing a WayCool way of working for all employees – old and new.
‘What we are doing now as part of Project Concorde is to see how we continue to realise the benefit of the transformation which we have made in the company and create a new operating model for the future, driven by a centre of excellence, which will then form the basis for all the enabling functions to operate in the future,’ Agarwal explained. Today, WayCool’s digital technology has influenced the company’s processes so that the overall experience is uniform and scalable, and not person dependent.
‘One major intervention that actually helped us is the creation of a ‘control tower', a consortium of the business users, with a SPOC from each business or critical function. With this, the ownership of tech interventions and the processes that are rolled out has improved significantly,’ said Saradhi.
The results are tangible. The beat plan adherence has increased to about 95%, compared to about 30–40% earlier. This translates into a 40–80% increase in the average salesman productivity. The other major impact has been observed in collections. When WayCool started doing business, 100% of the payments were in cash, especially in retail. Now, about 57% collections have gone digital, significantly bringing down the risks that come with cash collection. This figure is expected to increase to 80% in the next two quarters. WayCool has also launched virtual account numbers to tackle unidentified and unaccounted digital transactions. This has a customer adoption rate of about 30%.
How does WayCool plan to balance profitability and growth going forward?
‘We have built a very robust business model. We have built significant specific capabilities in each part of the value chain, starting from sourcing to supply chain logistics or distribution, and integrated them with technology. Using this technology and the kind of data that we are getting; we are able to apply cutting-edge analytics to identify specific profit holes in this entire value chain which we can target and leverage quickly by addressing the pitfalls. By December 2023, we are targeting to cover all our costs – variable as well as fixed – and by March 2024 we are planning to reach earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) breakeven,’ he said.
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio.
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