EPT Global Logistics sees a 2.5x increase in revenue after building a custom ERP on Zoho Creator

Summary

EPT Global Logistics is an international logistics company that handles freight forwarding, customs clearance, and warehousing distributions, from India to all across the world. They offer exports and imports by air, land, sea, and multi-modal transportation.

The company has been using Zoho Creator since 2020, and it's enabled them to build powerful applications that are tailored to specific needs. They built an all-in-one ERP, called Prowise, which allows them to manage customer portals, management reports, dashboards for users and supervisors, and HR processes. Since implementing Prowise, the company has seen the biggest impact in terms of time, cost, and quality of service provided.

The company

EPT Global Logistics is a leading player in providing turnkey logistics solutions to various industry verticals for over 15 years. Headquartered in India, the company has grown globally with its grit and determination to form a world-class logistics company that's governed by its people, processes, and technology. The company focuses on bringing value to its clients by delivering cross-border solutions through its greater domain knowledge and global network.

The challenge

EPT Global Logistics has been in business for almost 16 years now, and over that period of time, lots of technology interfaces have been developed, particularly for international logistics. Two such technologies used in their business are:

• Customs - The company uses a customs portal to interact with customs systems by entering specific information, such as the value of goods being imported or exported.
• Booking - Once the necessary information, such as the value of goods, is entered into the customs portal's front-end, the system automatically facilitates the booking process with shipping companies and airlines, without requiring direct human intervention.

Some of EPT Global's major challenges were:

• Using multiple legacy systems was time-consuming, as they didn't have a user-friendly interface.
• Legacy systems had more data entry points than was necessary for process control.
• The company lacked the ability to automate processes and tasks, which led to a lot of manual work.
• MIS (management information system) report designs weren't easy to pivot, which left data-driven decisions difficult.
• Due to the nature of their industry, the company was facing new field additions, new documents, and new challenges everyday—and chasing software providers was too time-consuming and costly.
• Customization was challenging in terms of both cost and time.

The solution

These challenges made them look for alternative solutions, which is when they found Zoho Creator. After examining a couple of solutions, the company decided to purchase Creator for its integration, flexibility, and customization features.

Bhatt stated that Zoho Creator has helped them in replacing spreadsheets and parts of the legacy ERP they were using. It was the best fit for their company, as it had great UX and MIS. Using Zoho Creator, they were able to integrate with other Zoho products and third-party apps easily, which made it highly versatile for their business operations.

Some of the key features they utilized were workflows, securing data access control, automating notifications and alerts via email, integrating with third-party applications, and creating powerful reports. Bhatt also said that their field staff frequently use mobile applications to update the milestones and status of their cargo.

On Zoho Creator, they've created individual, team, department, and role-based dashboards that have driven improved efficiency. And the database integration with Zoho Analytics has done wonders for their MIS and laid the foundation to bring AI into their various trend predictions.

In their trial-and-error phase, they built over a dozen applications for various purposes, finally leading them to build a master app, named Prowise, which the entire team at EPT Global utilizes.

Prowise is a full-fledged custom ERP built by Akshay; it's integrated with Zoho Books, Zoho Analytics, Zoho CRM, Zoho Mail, Zoho Cliq, Zoho Meetings, Zoho Social, Zoho Sign, and more. The app has 36 users and the team uses it on their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices.

These are some of the Prowise app features that have helped them save time and money:

• Customer portals
• Management reports
• Dashboards for users and supervisors
• Inventory management
• HR process

Benefits and ROI

EPT Global has implemented Zoho ecosystem to automate their business processes. It has helped them reduce the human workforce, increase efficiency of their processes, improve the availability of data, and made their tax payments more prompt. They saw an increase in productivity by an average of 15%, that has resulted in a 2.5x increase in their revenue.

Looking forward