Few may know that India is not just the largest milk producer, but also the largest consumer of dairy products in the world.

The industry offers a complex product line compounded with very short shelf life. The “Cow-To-Consumer” value chain has a number of stakeholders, beginning with farmers who produce milk, to milk processors & manufacturers, to transporters and finally the retailers. Connecting all key touch points procurement, processing, and distribution occur on a daily cycle and integrating them on a common technology platform is the key challenge. 

Mother Dairy has traditionally leveraged technology to support its operations. The IT strategy and vision is conceptualized and managed by the CIO who reports to the MD. Mother Dairy has implemented first SAP ERP for dairy industry in India in 2008 to ensure seamless integration of business processes like procurement, production, supply chain management, sales & distribution, and finance.

While most of the dairies in India are using stand-alone system for managing milk collection at village level, Mother Dairy has created a unique end-to-end milk procurement application for sourcing milk from rural areas. This has helped overcome the challenge of tracking pilferage & losses and monitoring quality at each stage of milk collection.

Tracking & controlling temperature from sourcing to retail point during transit & storage is critical for delivering right product quality to the end consumer. Central level integration & monitoring of logistics helps optimize routes and monitor costs, temperature & pilferage.

Mother Dairy registers service tickets into single integrated system for all its customers (Consumer, Farmer, Trade Partner and Field Equipment User). It has enhanced the visibility of customer feedback multifold, enabled us to take corrective measures, improve the service turn-around time and overall responsiveness of the organization.

Resilience at each stage has to be in the fabric of IT design to ensure that systems do not fail at any stage. The disaster recovery strategy not just needs to be in place but, has to function in real business scenario. Mother Dairy annually tests its DR site by switching over and performing with real business transactions on DR infrastructure. 

The adoption of digital technologies like mobility solution and social media holds great promise to engage real-time with consumer and innovate products. Enhancing the mobility footprint is the key focus of the organization in order to capture & provide information to right people anywhere anytime.

With changing shopping preferences, the future of dairy industry lies in creating an omni-channel to offer seamless shopping experience to the consumer whether shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a bricks and mortar store.

Mother Dairy by leveraging technology strives to deliver happy food so that there are many more happy people.