SAP SE today announced that Exotic Food Thailand (Exotic Food), a leader in Thai seasoning and ingredients, has accelerated its global expansion and innovation efforts by leveraging RISE with SAP, a comprehensive business transformation package that includes an AI-powered cloud ERP solution, infrastructure, and services.
Founded in 1999, Exotic Food boasts a presence in 80 countries with over 800 stock keeping units (SKU), making it a household name for Thai flavors worldwide. Their recent surge in global sales reflects a 73% year-over-year growth, benefiting from the newly implemented RISE with SAP which allowed Exotic Food to handle this rapid growth and large volume of transactions with ease.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as people stayed home and cooked more, the increased orders put a strain on Exotic Food's existing on-premise ERP system, hindering scalability. To address this, in January 2023, the organization successfully implemented RISE with SAP, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), migrating its on-premise ERP system to the cloud. Powered by SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP enabled Exotic Food to integrate key business functions, streamline operational processes, and improve real-time decision-making. The transition to AWS cloud hosting also boosted performance and stability.
"The implementation of RISE with SAP on AWS has truly transformed our business operations, enabling us to focus on growth and innovation in the global market," said Vasana Jantarach, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Exotic Food Thailand. "SAP S/4HANA Cloud has optimized our operational workloads while maintaining staff capacity. It has helped to integrate our financial processes across different departments, providing us a centralized view and allowed us to automate tasks from sales order computation, inventory management, through order fulfilment. The cloud ERP system also handles diverse product configurations in real time, helping us to reach more food lovers globally in less time."
Through streamlining financial processes, SAP S/4HANA Cloud helped Exotic Food reduce manual workloads, and achieve faster, more accurate month-end closings. Previously, the process was lengthy due to the recurring need to verify and correct source data. With real-time data recording and verification enabled by SAP S/4HANA Cloud, financial reports are now generated in shorter times with less errors, significantly speeding up the process. The time required for monthly closings has been reduced from 18 days to just eight days.
Data traceability, production planning, and automation are crucial in the food industry. Previously, transaction data and record-keeping were done on paper, making it tedious to find information for financial audits. With business-critical data now digitalized and migrated onto SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Exotic Food has improved efficiency. Traceability tasks that once took four hours now take just three minutes?a 99 percent reduction. This allows Exotic Food to keep a clean and audit-ready record of its business transactions and enables employees to focus on more strategic tasks, significantly boosting innovation and productivity.
Automation also helped the organization eliminate multiple manual steps for employees, reducing stocktaking time from two days to half a day on average, a 75 percent reduction, freeing up staff to take on other, business-critical tasks.
Kulwipa Piyawattanametha, Managing Director SAP Indochina, said, "Exotic Food Thailand's success in transforming its business to the cloud through RISE with SAP is a testament to the capabilities and value that SAP solutions bring. With enhanced information management, including having a single source of truth and increased data transparency, Exotic Food has significantly improved its operations, making decision-making more convenient for management and allowing the team to focus more on productivity. Furthermore, with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Exotic Food can now add on new solution extensions more flexibly and accelerate its innovation through cloud-based, AI-powered capabilities that SAP and our partner ecosystem offer."
For Exotic Food, having a clear objective with well-defined ERP scope, an experienced SAP implementing partner, and robust post-go-live support, were the keys to success.
"Migrating an on-premise ERP system to the cloud is a long-term journey, and the project go-live is one of the major milestones. As the implementing partner for Exotic Food Thailand's adoption of RISE with SAP, we are proud to bring our deep expertise in the manufacturing and food industry to support and work alongside SAP and the customer. Together, we look forward to helping Exotic Food drive successful optimization of their business operations in Thailand and across the globe," said Wisit Wirayagorn, Managing Director, NTT DATA Business Solutions (Thailand) Ltd.