Parle Products and IBM partner to drive growth amid pandemic

FMCG major Parle Products and IBM on Thursday announced a partnership under which the IT major will provide technological support to the biscuit maker to bring its products to the market quickly and effectively.

Parle will leverage IBM's transformative hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, along with its leading security and industry expertise with the tech major's business consulting and technology services, the two companies said in a joint statement.

This 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, it added.

Also read: IBM uncovers more attacks against Covid-19 vaccine supply chain

Commenting on the partnership, Parle Products Executive Director Ajay Chauhan said, "as the largest biscuit brand provider in India, our priority is meeting the growing demands of Indian consumers. 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."

Under the partnership, Parle Products will migrate its mission-critical SAP workloads, ERP, supply chain, and analytics applications to IBM Cloud, while IBM will also help design a critical KPIs-based performance management framework to measure and monitor the health of Parle's business processes and their outcomes, the statement said.

Moreover, Parle will also be leveraging IBM's deep industry expertise with IBM Global Business Services (GBS) and Global Technology Services (GTS) to host its workloads on IBM Cloud, among other services, it added.

Parle said by embracing a hybrid cloud-based approach, it expects to innovate more quickly – finding new ways to get its products into the homes of consumers, even as the coronavirus pandemic creates challenges in the supply chain and mandates that some employees work remotely.

Read more: Blizzard, IBM use AI to find the best Overwatch players

Through streamlining operations and achieving greater scalability to meet changing demands, Parle expects to witness business growth in India and beyond, it added.

IBM India Managing Director Sandip Patel said IBM's collaboration with Parle has brought in decades of industry and technology expertise to help realise their vision of ensuring the right products are made available in the market at the right time.

"By leveraging the technologies like hybrid cloud and AI, underpinned by security, Parle will be well equipped to meet growing consumer demands, while security is at the forefront of their digital innovations," he added.