Its wide range of customers includes a global religious ministry, Jesus Calls, founded by the late D.G.S. Dhinakaran and Paul Dhinakaran, to which Wings sold an ERP package. Its other clients, however, are more temporal.

A prime example is the attitude of its customers. Nilesh Gupta, managing director, Vijay Sales, a white goods retail major & one of their longest-standing customers, finds the relationship still going strong, after a partnership of nearly 15 years. “This is nothing short of a miracle in today’s times, where ties break for any flimsy reason,” he says. “I think that, primarily, the reason for such bonding is that we understand each other and respect each other’s domain knowledge – and, on top of it, we trust each other a lot.”

Since 2005, Gupta says, Wings has come to him time and again on its own and upgraded it to a different platform to cater to the customer’s need to manage its growth. “Their intent was not to make more money out of these transitions, but to ensure we are future-proof and future-ready,” he points out, adding: “This one trait, plus being available on all our working days – specifically, even on weekends – is a great reason for our partnership. Overall, we now consider them to be our integral part and not a third-party vendor.”

Goan mall major CMM Arena, which retails products like home furniture, home appliance, office furniture, modular kitchen and home décor from mega-stores in Panaji, Mapusa, Margao, Vasco and Ponda, was looking for a single solution to handle both its front-end and back-end businesses. Says Hari Kaul, general manager, retail, CMM Arena: “During our evaluation process and subsequent demo we found that Wings has all the features, which we were looking for within our budget.” Having started using it in April 2017, the chain can see effective utilisation of its resources across the channels and generate reports in time to fix any operational problems.

Describing Wings ERP as an “affordable, reachable and workable solution for various categories of retail, particularly electronics and appliances”, Kaul says it has implemented solutions in inventory management, billing, ordering, CRM, and a bridge with Arena’s online presence. “In addition to all that, the finance and BI tool is interesting for planning of resources at the back end,” he adds.

Popular loves Wings

Rajesh Bhaskaran of Popular says the company decided to have an integrated application covering all processes and functions to consolidate the financials of all companies of its 75-year-old parent Kuttukaran group, which has leading automobile dealerships for global brands through Kerala and in other parts of India as well. OEM dealers for Maruti have to use the DMS (dealer management system) provided by the manufacturer, as it is the source of all operational data – be it sales or service. Over a period of time, however, Popular has found many things missing in the DMS, as well as restrictions of use that were bottlenecks to improve its own operational efficiency.

Wings ERP was finalised after the evaluation of many applications that were offered, starting with major modules, which are part of the suite like Car Sales, Car Service, Used Car, Finance, CRM, HRMS, Payroll and Fixed Assets. “Ours being an old company, change management was a huge challenge; but we were able to manage it satisfactorily,” he says. “From a business perspective, we have deployed the application across all locations and are capturing the process data centrally.”

The second phase of implementation will start for activities like fine-tuning the process flows, build more controls as required, integrating with banks, process automation, and advanced analytics and dashboards. Popular also plans to build new process modules for procurement, business annual plans and projects.

This has been a new and challenging project for Wings too, in terms of the scale of operations, complexities, controls and user management, Kamlesh says. “There is continuous evolving of the application to manage data, users and performance. We faced many challenging times, but came out with extra dedicated efforts to ensure that all the areas are covered.” Adds Bhaskaran: “I am sure, in due course, we can make the application a strong base to manage the business efficiently and scale up for any changes as required.”