Engro Fertilizers Limited's 2021 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY: Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation

Engro Fertilizers (EFERT) has been leading the green revolution in Pakistan by empowering farmers with world class Seed-to-Harvest solutions and directly influencing 40% of the agricultural productivity.

With customer centricity as it’s central idea, EFERT has led Pakistan’s digital transformation of the agricultural value-chain through a mobile and web-enabled application, Engro Humsafar. This is a B2B digital platform for fertilizer dealers, offering a differentiated customer experience that enables dealers to transact with EFERT round the clock. An industry first, this app has now delivered over $600 million in sales in a mere 14 months since launch enabling a faster sales turnover and making Engro Humsafar the largest e-sales application in Pakistan. The second biggest online-selling app in Pakistan makes half of this through e-Commerce.

Engro Humsafar app offers an “ecosystem of innovative payment solutions” that provides EFERT dealers a differentiated customer experience to place orders and make payments from anywhere, anytime.

Traditional Order-to-Cash Process

The traditional process is long and tedious: the dealer visits the bank to first get the payment processed. The payment instrument is then forwarded to EFERT’s warehouse located 10 to 40 km from the dealer’s location. The warehouse receives the payment instrument and records the entry in EFERT’s SAP database. Once approval is received in SAP, it authorizes the warehouse to proceed with placing the dealer’s order. The dealer visits again to place the order. This process takes roughly 2 to 3 days but if the payment instrument is a bank guarantee, then it takes additional 2 days.

Selling fertilizers for dealers is a business with low margins and is driven by high turnover of sales. The faster the dealers sell, the more profit they make. Thus, any step aimed at faster execution of order to cash cycle for the dealers through improved customer experience, was likely going to be a huge success.

Engro Humsafar App – EFERT Flexing Its Wings with Innovation in the Digital Landscape

EFERT was the first to identify that the next leap in transformation would be from simplification of the order to cash cycle. This required digitizing the manual processes and collaborating with banks and partners to provide an online “ecosystem of innovative payment solutions”.

In September 2020 the Engro Humsafar app was launched nationwide. Dealers were informed and trained through internal channels of communication and because the response was overwhelming, a large population quickly latched on to the new Engro Humsafar app as well, with help from our on-ground field force.

Game-Changing Results

Within 14 months of launch, Engro Humsafar app usage had reached 83% of the EFERT’s total dealer network in Pakistan. The dealers had placed more than 40,000 orders through Engro Humsafar app which reflect 63% of the total orders received by EFERT thus, enabling the business to cross $600 million in revenue by October 2021.