Kolos Cement boosts efficiency and agility with a unified Oracle Cloud
Kolos Cement enhances business efficiency, agility, and visibility with Oracle in the Cloud.
Kolos Cement is one of the largest cement manufacturers in Mauritius, supplying cement to most of the country’s large and medium construction companies as well as to a multitude of hardware stores scattered across the island. To increase competitiveness against its main rival, a large international firm, Kolos recognized the need to increase internal efficiency by replacing its end-of-life enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with a modern platform that could enhance visibility, streamline processes from production to sales, and also integrate with its weighbridge system and mobile devices.
“With an integrated Oracle Cloud Platform we have dramatically increased visibility into our cement business, from production through sales, finance, and delivery processes. Managers can access reports and respond immediately instead of waiting until month end, increasing our agility considerably.”
Business challenges
- Enhance business agility by improving reporting capability and companywide visibility—for example making business-critical information concerning sales, stock levels, and cement production output rapidly available to key decision makers to enable immediate action
- Minimize exposure to business risk by improving financial controls, for example setting credit limits for each individual customer, and ensuring proper customer credit checks when placing cement orders
- Support Kolos’s ability to meet its key performance indicators (KPIs)—including 15 minute dispatching time of trucks through the weigh station, and 90% on-time deliveries—by streamlining and unifying all processes from cement production to delivery on a fully-integrated platform
- Improve business efficiency across cement sales, production, and finance processes by minimizing errors and manual processes
Oracle Cloud was better suited to our needs than other solutions, predominantly due to its flexibility and rich functionality, which meant minimal customization for our cement business, and also its low cost of ownership.
Results
- Streamlined cement production, sales, purchasing, and finance processes for increased productivity by implementing a unified Oracle Cloud Platform for 25 users across the company
- Minimized financial risk by improving controls on revenue, cash collection, and debt management
- Increased business agility by providing managers with sales figures daily instead of monthly, and by delivering real-time visibility into all areas of the company—enabling Kolos to rapidly identify an issue with cement sales discounting and take immediate corrective action
- Integrated all business operations on a common Oracle Cloud Platform to increase business efficiency, for example by better aligning cement production with sales orders to ensure that Kolos always has sufficient stock to meet its 90% target for on-time order deliveries
- Minimized business risk by using Oracle Financials Cloud to increase financial controls—for example by providing role-based system access, and enabling staff to set up specific credit limits for each client or to rapidly block client accounts or ledgers
- Improved financial controls during customer sales by integrating Oracle Accounts Receivable with mobile applications used by field sales executives—eliminating the risk of processing sales orders from customers whose accounts are blocked or who have not reconciled their accounts following previous cement deliveries
- Reduced manual tasks significantly and eliminated errors in the cement distribution process by integrating Oracle Order Management Cloud Service with Kolos’s cement weighbridge system, supporting Kolos’s KPI for truck dispatch within 15 minutes without the need for staff to work overtime
- Optimized stock management thanks to the ability to instantly view cement stock levels against sales orders and make immediate changes to production—a considerable improvement over the previous situation where figures were only available at month end after considerable manual consolidation
- Improved analysis of sales, expenses, and cement business performance by delivering standardized and custom reports on personalized dashboards—available anytime and anywhere—with the facility to drill down into each transaction by customer, product, or region
- Streamlined financial processes and improved control of account reconciliations thanks to a unified Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud, anticipating a reduction in month-end closing time from five to three days
- Promoted digital and cloud transformation in the world of cement production and sales to guarantee industry-leading customer experiences and business outcomes
Partners
Kolos Cement worked with Oracle Partner AGILEUM for its Oracle Cloud deployment and also to provide user training and post-implementation support services to assist with the company’s change management. AGILEUM conducted the complete Oracle Cloud implementation including integration with Kolos’s weighbridge system and handheld tablets, achieving successful go-live in just five months.