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Case study

The challenge

Danzas AEI—a top logistics and freight-forwarding provider in the United Arab Emirates—wanted to modernize its enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including back-office and core operations. The company also wanted to migrate to a technology platform that would maximize efficiency and reduce revenue leakage. Highly customized business processes, which had grown organically over the past 15 years, were driving complexity. Danzas’ legacy ERP system did not have a procurement capability, so approximately 80 staff members performed all associated processes manually using Microsoft Excel. In addition to suboptimal financial processes and delayed month-end closes, the company had little ability to manage suppliers.

A simple ERP software upgrade would not renovate old business processes, so the management team decided to modernize the company’s technology platform, incorporating standard best practices, and then roll it out across the enterprise for better governance. Danzas turned to Cognizant for help.

Our approach

Cognizant led the transformation, using Oracle Cloud for modules such as financials, procurement and supplier management, as well as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) implementation to enable business process reengineering. The solution runs on a single instance of Oracle Cloud, lowering the total cost of ownership. It features single sign-on, redundancy, recovery as backup, and a suite of reporting and analytics tools, including those for days sales outstanding and productivity, to help reduce revenue leakage. Automated procurement and supplier management processes enable Danzas to analyze spending.

Our Cloud Accelerators blueprint, which is based on global best practices, helped speed the migration. The development team used a combination of agile and waterfall practices, driven by each case, and rolled out the modules in two phases. The project dataset covered over 6,500 customers, more than 950 suppliers, 36,000 accounts receivable invoices and two years of general ledger balances. Given the complexity of the processes and the fact that they were performed manually, it was a challenge to map them to design new ways of working. Our team worked closely with Danzas to help the employees adapt to the new working model through campaigns, training and awareness sessions.

Automation increases efficiency and agility

With its automated, workflow-driven solution, Danzas generates significant cost savings while increasing compliance and controls. The procurement team can now make data-based decisions leveraging the rate charged by the supplier and other performance metrics. And with streamlined processes and best-in-class accounting systems, the Danzas AEI finance team can easily analyze, reconcile and close data. 

The cloud migration also improved the employee experience. Staff can now use mobile devices for approvals, making their jobs easier and more efficient. With a modern cloud infrastructure in place, Danzas is nimble and ready to take on new opportunities.

Reduced

revenue leakage and improved controls by automating manual processes

Increased

agility by removing the need to maintain an ERP platform on-premises

Created

a unified system of auditable records