India-based Parle Products began its confectionery business in Mumbai in 1929, and the company grew to become a best-selling biscuit (cookie to Americans) brand. But it underwent a dramatic change when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the company’s supply chain. The coronavirus sent many of Parle’s employees to work from home, and revenue suffered. Now Parle has tapped its long-standing relationship with IBM in the hopes that it will be able to use IBM’s hybrid cloud, security, industry expertise, artificial intelligence capabilities, as well as IBM’s business consulting and technology services to boost business. 

This latest collaboration will help Parle get its products, such as Parle-G, the world’s top-selling biscuit by volume, to market at the right time and in the right place: into the hands and mouths of consumers.

Parle anticipates it will be able to innovate with more speed as it embraces a hybrid cloud-based approach. Its goal is to discover fresh ways to further bring Parle products into consumers’ homes. 

IBM will facilitate a streamlined operation and greater scalability to meet changing demands as the pandemic continues to sweep across India (the latest reports cite 16.3 million COVID-19 cases, and this week it logged the highest global single-day new cases). As it leverages IBM’s hybrid cloud, Parle expects to witness business growth in India and around the globe.

“As the largest biscuit brand provider in India, our priority is meeting the growing demands of Indian consumers,” said Ajay Chauhan, executive director, Parle Products. He continued, “By working with IBM to accelerate our journey to the cloud and strengthen our security posture, we will work to uncover new ways to reduce time-to-market and streamline operations, a significant milestone for us.”

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The key IBM technologies and services Parle will use across the hybrid cloud and AI are: 

• The cloud: Parle will migrate to the IBM cloud its SAP workloads, ERP supply chain and analytics applications to promote productivity in business functions such as finance, HR and procurement

• AI: IBM will use IBM Watson Studio to design a performance management framework, monitoring business processes and advocate for an appropriate product mix, faster planning and scheduling, and optimization of supply chain costs

• Services: IBM Global Business Services and Global Technology Services will host Parle’s workloads on IBM Cloud

• Security: Through IBM’s Security Operations Center Parle and IBM will build a security program to increase its resiliency and security. It will also leverage IBM X-Force Red’s services to uncover vulnerabilities and support Parle’s security teams to identify and remediate security flaws. 

The goal is for Parle to increase efficiencies in production management, optimize inventory and logistics costs, and bring intelligence to sourcing activities. 

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