Enterprise Transformation from Expenses to Operations at IFFCO – Zoho

Video Interview for Zoho by Jason English

Jaroslav ‘Jarek’ Pietraszko, Group CIO of Dubai-based multinational IFFCO, sits down with Jason English ‘JE’, Director & Principal Analyst, Intellyx to discuss their enterprise transformation using the Zoho suite of application creation, customer management and back-office operations software, at #ZohoDay25 February 2025 near Austin, TX.

Read the Intellyx case study blog about IFFCO’s digital transformation with Zoho here: https://intellyx.com/2025/02/26/creating-and-operating-new-digital-capabilities-with-zoho-and-manageengine-at-iffco/.

Watch the interview video below or visit our YouTube page at: https://youtu.be/J1kUaWS9PUA

 

Full transcript of the interview:

JE: Hi, I’m Jason English. I’m an analyst with Intellyx, and welcome to ZohoDay25. This is my probably fourth time to do this event. It’s always really enjoyable because we get to find out about new Zoho products in addition to the suite, as well as meet great Zoho customers like Jaroslav here, what’s your role, and what does your company do?

Jarek: My name is Jarek Pietraszko. I am a chief Information Officer for IFFCO Group. Based out of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. IFFCO Group is a large FMCG manufacturing company, probably one of the biggest in the Middle East, we’re talking about various kind of categories of products like oils, imports, and culinary impulse business, but we are also talking about the beauty products which we distribute in mainly in Africa and obviously some supportive divisions like a packaging division or the transportation division when we deliver all the goods across the whole Middle East region to our customers and to our distribution centers.

JE: Wow, so a very diverse product base and number of things that you’re selling there, right?

Jarek: Yeah, it’s a bit of B2B, it’s a bit of B2C, it’s a bit of almost everything, yeah.

JE: Cool. So how did you start your journey with Zoho?

Jarek: We started in 2019 when we were looking for the real system when we can start managing our expenses globally.

At that point of time, we had a very fragmented way of managing this topic. We had the policy which was introduced in our base country, but in other companies, in other countries, we didn’t have this kind of control. So we looked and we tried to evaluate the options for us. One was to go for the internal development of the product.

But then we said here that probably the total cost of ownership, management of that moving forward is going to cost us too much. And it always takes time, for example, to deploy any changes. So the other option was, let’s go for one of the well-known systems on the market, but they are very much tied to one of the ERP providers.

And because we were in the transition place between both, we said we need to have something a bit more universal. And this is how we derived the conclusion, let’s look for a system which is independent from the ERP providers and which is not really internal development.

And that’s how we found Zoho Expense. And we realized after just a few days of playing with the system ourselves, without any training and manuals or anything, we were able to build pretty complex policies and we can understand how to build all these calculations, rules, and permissions within the system that we can manage also the complexity of the organization and approvals, for example, expenses that happen across the multiple countries.

Having compliance to the local regulations in all of those countries, including you know, emerging markets where sometimes you have a complexity you would not see in the U.S. or in Europe. And that was a pretty fast implementation. It took for us three months to bring that as a pilot to UAE.

And then we rolled it out to the rollout was going hand-in-hand with the deploying of the processes by HR or finance, or the administration team. The IT piece was pretty straightforward. When we had the model, we just did a few adjustments to be compliant and that’s all. So in total, for us to have that deployed globally it took nine months.

And then we expanded even further. Bringing us from not only travel expenses or the employee expenses, but bringing the petty cash expenses, which significantly reduce the flow of the cash in company. So, we converted that into prepayments or purchase-based payments, or to the top up cards, which yeah, obviously reduce the cash.

In some of the markets, we were not able to achieve it when they are cash driven, you can’t do anything, but I would say 70 percent of the countries we operate right now are cashless.

JE: Wow. So what modules of Zoho are you using now? Besides Expense or what?

Jarek: So, one of the integral parts Zoho offers is Zoho Analytics.

Each and every time we go for any of the products from Zoho portfolio, you want to understand the data behind it, you have to go for Zoho Analytics. But the Zoho Analytics gives us a pretty nice way of visualizing this data, 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.

That’s one aspect. The second aspect of the other product we are using from Zoho is Zoho Creator. We brought in multiple application custom workflows where we do not have a solution out of the box. And obviously Zoho Analytics also helps here. Another product we use from the Zoho portfolio is really from the sister company, we are talking about ManageEngine.

JE: Yes.

Jarek

But also right now, we are building the centralized dashboard that the senior management at the corporate level will be able to see how the particular functions are performed.

JE: Were you able to replace some of these external services that you were using or some of those? Existing systems that might have been a little costlier or more limiting to your ability to change?

Jarek: Okay, so you know, Zoho Expense is a good example. We didn’t have something which was which was working globally. Now, bringing the control, bringing the policies, bringing the approval across the countries, it was a significant game changer. On top of that, because we changed completely how we manage that process, it became a paperless expense reporting.

I mean, the claims. Previously, we used to collect the documentation. We used to club them, and then put them into the cabinet, where the shared services every two weeks used to collect those kind of reports along with the particular expenses. We converted that completely into digital mode when you’re getting back from the business trip, and you can do your claim in two minutes instead of spending an hour.

JE: Hmm.

Jarek: 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 are ice creams. And we have thousands of freezers deployed to the market. And obviously the cold chain team versus the sales team, they couldn’t get into agreement.

What is the real number of the freezers on the market? We finally were able to build a system that the communication between them, that every redrawering of the freezer, every repair of the freezer is managed through the system. So there is complete visibility and there is no ambiguity anymore.

JE: Hmm. Wow.

It sounds like a lot of your challenges were probably related to not just scaling the system, but getting adoption. So how did you encourage adoption across so many diverse units?

Jarek: Okay, let me start with Zoho Expense again. We went live just after the lockdown for COVID 19 came so, you know, it was pretty natural that the people couldn’t really claim the business expenses in the old way.

This adoption, they have really been forced to adopt into the system—that was really adding fuel to the fire. Then it went very smoothly, and when the people understood the benefits coming out of this, and the minimal training required, then obviously this adoption went very well.

The example with ManageEngine, which is a ticketing tool, today you cannot really be efficient managing any of this kind of services without the proper tracking of all the activities of the requirements, which are coming from the users—our vendors, suppliers, customers. So you know, it also came pretty easily.

Now, when we are talking about Creator, very often when we get the requirement from the business, we want to understand the full business scenario. And we are supporting the business stakeholders from that perspective, in order to plan the adoption. How can we get the buy-in from the users, so that they will not feel that they are forced to use it, but that they will see the benefits?

And when we are talking about the custom workflows, very often there is a weakness within the company, that basically everyone understands and it’s pretty easy to get this adoption.

It’s a different story than, for example, talking about any CRM systems, right? No one loves to spend the time on the CRMs. This is where this discipline really has to come.

The Zoho Expense and Zoho Creator or ManageEngine, it was not as challenging to switch as a CRM product.

JE: Interesting. Have you explored using any of Zoho’s AI types of features, the Zia assistant or any other aspects of that?

Jarek: So today we had a very interesting session when we were able to understand how Zia is going to work across the multiple different applications.

Now we need to probably understand from our IFFCO specifics how we can potentially integrate with the other systems we use, because Zia’s AI power will come whenever we will be able to bring in information from multiple sources, club them together and present them in some kind of a reasonable way.

So this [ZohoDay] event gives me the benefits of exchanging this kind of idea, and even brainstorming with the other participants what kind of business cases we can have.

You know, AI, at least for me, is based on the four pillars. The first pillar is the AI which is used by the user to support them on daily operations. And this is what can mainly be achieved by training.

The second is when we are talking about improvements to the automation we have. For example, you have automatic scanning and the booking of the documents. From time to time, the RPA will get stuck, and then the AI can come and solve a lot of these kind of issues.

Another aspect is related to producing the marketing content, which we do pretty extensively at IFFCO.

And the last aspect from the AI standpoint is how to solve the real problems or the real issues which the business is facing. I can give an example of promotion management.

Usually the process is, you agree to the budget for promoting a particular group of products. And then you’re spending that over the year, just analyzing if you are not crossing the budget for the promotion. Instead, we have an AI model which can identify the moment where any additional spend is not going to give you any benefits.

Or you can shift the budget from one product category to the other category. That’s something where we are working right now on these kinds of AI specific cases.

JE: Yeah, smaller basically smaller model AIs that are very specialized to those specific needs, right? They speak the language of the, of the applications that they’re using.

They’re not just, they’re not just there. To talk to you, right?

Jarek: Yes. So right now we are working on also bringing from the analytics standpoint, the self service to our users because the amount of the dashboards you can build and you can keep building. But until you provide to the super users, the self service capabilities, there is always this kind of discomfort on the both sides from the I.

T. That we not deliver what the business is looking for, and the business cannot get the information they’re looking for. But you know, as a part of this implementation, we are also looking to bring this natural language processing that this communication with the numbers we have is going to be significantly simplified, and, you know, we will not have to spend or the business will not have to spend the time of, you know, adding these columns, doing some calculations.

Let’s Hey, I do the job.

JE: Any other Thoughts coming out of this Zoho Day 25 so far?

Jarek: I’m glad to see that the Zoho right now is officially expanding to the enterprise level. I remember when we, as a large organization, multi-billion dollar company, when we were starting our journey with Zoho, there were not very many customers who could, for example, give us the reference of going for this kind of system.

So, you know, that is giving us another confidence that we took a really good decision in 2019, 2020, when we went live with the Zoho Expense in the first product, and then we started using also other products from the Zoho portfolio.

JE: Yeah, it really is starting to prove itself out with some larger customers here.

Yeah. Very good to see. All right. Well, thanks so much. This has been Jason English signing off from Zoho Day 25 from Intellyx. And?

Jarek:  Jarek Pietraszko from IFFCO.