How Gopal Namkeen modernized its order-processing system to improve dealer experience

Gopal Namkeen is one of the oldest and leading Indian brands, supplying namkeen and snacks in national and international markets. Gopal Namkeen was founded in 1994 and is headquartered at Rajkot, in the state of Gujarat, India.

Business challenge

Gopal Namkeen has over 500 dealers, creating more than 12,000 SKU orders on a peak day. Order creation also involves integration with a backend enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Gopal Namkeen was using an old web portal to get orders from its dealers. This also involved bulk transactions because a majority of dealers buy wholesale products. Its underlying dealer portal application architecture had traditional hosting and was not optimized for speed and integration. In response, it was becoming sluggish as the number of transactions grew, and the user interface was hard to navigate and difficult to extend.

Dealer experience is critical to the growth of Gopal Namkeen’s business. Therefore, it was looking for an industry-standard solution that was scalable and secure and had dynamic integration features with the SAP S/4HANA system hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Business solution

Gopal Namkeen decided to modernize its dealer order-processing system with the following key features and solution requirements:

1. Secure and scalable as per user load
2. Dynamic, secure, and seamless integration with the SAP S/4HANA system on AWS
3. Responsive and extendable user interface
4. Optimized cost and resource usage

Gopal Namkeen worked alongside AeonX Digital, an AWS Partner, to modernize its dealer order-processing system. AeonX Digital is an IT company that primarily focuses on implementation, migration, and development of AWS and SAP workloads.

The AeonX team proposed a business solution in the form of a web portal, which is accessible to all dealers from the internet, and bridges the gap between dealers and the SAP system. Key modules of the solution and their respective process details are mentioned below.

• Application security: The system is designed to handle three types of roles: dealers, administrators, and developers. The system authenticates each user and redirects them to their respective dashboard. Users can access permissions according to their responsibilities. Permission allows granular control over every feature on the order portal, and any feature can be constrained within the order portal for security.

• Dashboards: There are eight near-real-time metrics for the admin dashboard and six near-real-time metrics for the dealer dashboard. Near-real-time metrics—like weekly orders, top five products sales, top five dealers, top five regions, and more—are available for informed decision-making.

• Dealer management: The dealer cannot be created from the order portal. It can only be pushed from the SAP system. Dealer data is pushed from SAP, and it goes through the approval system where the admin can accept or reject a dealer. Upon acceptance, the admin creates credentials and communicates them to the respective dealer.

• Order master data: Products, prices, taxes, and other relevant SAP master data are also pushed to the dealer order portal. Products then go through an approval system where the admin can accept or reject a product. Upon acceptance, the admin assigns a region(s) and publishes a product. Then all the dealers in its respective region(s) can use a product to create an order.

• Orders: Dealers generate orders on the portal and then sync them with the SAP system at regular intervals. The dealer can also download the product catalog as an Excel file and use a bulk-order creation process. The dealer can create orders only with an available credit balance. The credit balance is validated with the SAP system. When the credit balance is insufficient, the system can save the order in draft mode. After receiving payment from the vendor, the system automatically releases the credit block with the help of live integration with SAP. Dealers can track the order status and download a statement of account.

Solution architecture

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The web portal is accessed on the internet and served through Amazon CloudFront, which is a content delivery network (CDN) service to deliver content securely with low latency and high transfer speeds worldwide. Requests then route through the Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which distributes network traffic to improve application scalability, to serve dynamic content through origin servers hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

The dealer order-processing system is developed with the latest JavaScript and PHP Laravel framework, which supports a responsive front end and backend through integration with the SAP system. It is deployed on Apache Web Server running on Amazon Linux AMI.

The API backend is the core integration feature between the dealer order-processing system and SAP backend. Materials, dealers, and prices are maintained using APIs. SAP has full control over this master data. API requests and responses are in a standardized JSON format and secured with a HASH token for extra security. The system is also benchmarked for high concurrent requests.

The SAP S/4HANA system is managed by a different AWS SAP Competency Partner and hosted in an isolated Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which gives you full control over your virtual networking environment, within the same AWS Region. The Amazon VPC that hosts the dealer order-processing system communicates with SAP S/4HANA, which hosts the Amazon VPC through a secure VPC peering connection.

The application uses the latest version of MariaDB-based data stores for storing the relational data of its respective application module. The application and database are hosted on an Amazon EC2 Linux server based on an AWS Graviton processor. AWS Graviton processors are designed by AWS to deliver the best-priced performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.

Results

The dealer order-processing modernization solution went live in April 2022.

Since then, dealers have used the completely automated and flexible order-processing system. The system has helped reduce dealer onboarding time by 50 percent and business support calls by 60 percent and improved the overall dealer experience. Since it went live, the system hasn’t faced any downtime, even during peak orders, boosting dealer satisfaction and trust with Gopal Namkeen. Gopal Namkeen has also realized a cost benefit of over 47 percent without compromising performance by using AWS Graviton processor-based Amazon EC2 Instances.

Learn more

Modern companies are increasingly global, and their products are increasingly digital. These digital products—such as cloud infrastructure, mobile apps, big data pipelines, and social media—are influencing application development, which, in turn, requires an unprecedented pace of change for companies.

Learn more about important best practices, design patterns, and modern application pathways that you can use to build your modern application in the AWS Cloud at “Build modern applications on AWS.”

AWS Partner spotlight

AeonX Digital helps customers reach their business performance goals through SAP. Working in SAP application management services, sales, and SAP education and training domain, AeonX Digital helps companies to build and deploy resilient cloud applications at scale.