An Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English from #ZohoDay25
Achieving efficiencies of scale is a core tenet of every enterprise–in fact, it is the one thing that separates an enterprise-scale organization from other companies.
Most small-to-mid-sized companies can use an array of off-the shelf business tools and set up an ecommerce package behind a simple website, and achieve reasonably predictable results, without thinking about the complexities of applying different sales, logistics, and operations policies across multiple countries.
But the ability to scale digital operations to serve customers in more than 50 countries was exactly what IFFCO, a Dubai-based CPG multinational that manufactures and distributes goods from beauty products to culinary supplies and ice creams, along with all of the infrastructure necessary to deliver and support these products in local markets, needed to achieve.
At the analyst-only ZohoDay25 event near Austin, TX, I had a chance to catch up with IFFCO’s CIO, Jaroslaw “Jarek” Pietraszko about his organization’s enterprise transformation. You can watch the interview here.
Dispensing with receipts from expenses
A great place to start a digital transformation journey is digitization or ‘going paperless’ in order to digitalize existing business processes. With IFFCO’s global staff of more than 15,000 employees, many of them working in the field in different jurisdictions to support retailers, reporting and processing expenses according to regional policies was very time consuming.
Jarek’s team had a fragmented expense process, where employees would clip together all of their paper receipts for the month and send them into the home office for manual processing, with results finally being entered in their big-iron ERP system.
They first looked at adding an expense module to the ERP platform, but that seemed like too much vendor lock-in, and possibly inflexible to the different compliance needs of each country. Internally building and supporting a custom application was also considered, but the total cost of ownership for all of that work was too high.
“That’s how we found Zoho Expense,” said Jarek. “We realized after just a few days of playing with the system ourselves, without any training, manuals, or anything, we were able to build pretty complex policies and build all the calculations, rules, and permissions within the system, so that we can manage the complexity of the organization and approvals, for example, of expenses that happen across multiple countries.”
Of particular importance, because Zoho already operated in some cash-driven economies that couldn’t rely on credit cards or direct bank transfers, they were able to replenish top-up payment cards or mobile payment systems from the same system, thereby reducing dependence on paper currency.
Within three months, Jarek’s team brought out their first pilot Expense app for the U.A.E., and from there, by adjusting each country’s policies with input from HR, finance and admin teams, they were able to deploy services globally across all countries in just nine months.
Creating custom apps with cold analytical precision
With a successful Expense implementation going, IFFCO started looking for more digital transformation opportunities, and found that Zoho Creator could fulfill the constant need for custom applications that run atop their private data.
“For example, talking about Zoho Creator, one of the interesting deployments we’ve done is freezer management, because one of the products in our portfolio is ice cream. We have thousands of freezers deployed to the market, so obviously between the cold chain team versus the sales team, they couldn’t get into agreement,” Jarek said.
“What is the real number of freezers on the market? We were finally able to build a system that allows communication between them, that every redrawering or repair of the freezer is managed through the system. So there is complete visibility [into freezer capacity] and there is no ambiguity anymore.”
The team also wanted to get their arms around the value they were generating by building dozens of custom apps themselves, rather than relying on outsourced development or specialized COTS software that might not integrate easily with their current application and data footprint.
“Zoho Analytics gives us a pretty nice way of visualizing and understanding this data, and building very powerful dashboards which we can circulate across the different stakeholders and provide them role-based access to the specific data they are only authorized for,” Jarek said.
Stitching IT operations together with ManageEngine and Zia
IFFCO’s IT team was starting to gather quite an inventory of bespoke applications to support, running alongside their core enterprise ERP, CRM, and employee management systems.
Rather than investing in a big iron ITSM vendor and observability tools, they turned to Zoho’s ManageEngine suite to secure role-based access, monitor activity and take in feedback from their vendors, suppliers, employee associates and end customers.
All of IFFCO’s global divisions—from supply chain to HR—can use ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus to not only submit support tickets, but get an analytical view of their own IT suite performance against service level goals.
Now, they are pragmatically looking at Zoho’s Zia AI assistants as a way to further ease their huge distributed team’s interaction with their applications. Jarek expressed IFFCO’s generative AI adoption strategy as a “Four Pillars of AI” maturity model, which encompasses four capabilities of increasing levels of difficulty:
- Operational support: Training AI to help employees with daily administrative tasks and toil.
- Automation: Improving upon existing business processes and RPA bots with more resilient process automation that can adapt to change.
- Content generation: Producing documentation, product information, and marketing content to improve communication with customers, partners, and associates.
- Problem solving: Providing valuable insights and analytics to explore root causes of issues and help leaders and team members make better business decisions.
To demonstrate the problem-solving objectives of their AI efforts, Jarek provided an example of promotion management.
“The usual process is: you agree to the budget for promoting a particular group of products,” he said. “And then you’re spending that over the year, just analyzing if you are not crossing the budget for the promotion. Instead, we can now have an AI model which can identify the moment where any additional spend is not going to give you any benefits.”
The Intellyx Take
IFFCO offers a great example of how an enterprise should never really reach the end of its digital transformation journey.
That’s a good thing, if they can keep looking forward to adapt to changing market realities with new capabilities, rather than looking back and failing to innovate due to perceived risk or cost.
©2025 Intellyx B.V. Intellyx is editorially responsible for this document. At the time of writing, Zoho is an Intellyx subscriber. None of the other organizations mentioned here are Intellyx customers. No AI bots were used to write this content.
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