Khimji Ramdas uses Zoho Flow to automate sales and procurement by connecting its on-premise SAP ECC system

About the company

Khimji Ramdas is one of Oman's oldest and largest business houses. It began in 1870, when a merchant and his son sailing from Kutch in western India broke their usual trading voyage and decided one of them would stay at the port they had just reached. More than 150 years later the group is still run by the same family, now into its sixth generation.

Headquartered in Muscat, it operates across distribution, retail, infrastructure, and logistics, with an infrastructure arm covering work as varied as electrical contracting and marine construction. The group employs over 5,000 people, represents hundreds of global brands, and reaches most of Oman through more than 3,500 direct distribution points and close to 300 retail outlets.

Automating the sales process with on-premise SAP ECC and Zoho CRM

Their sales team used to run almost entirely on spreadsheets: leads, opportunities, quotations, customer details, and pricing all tracked in files that were emailed around, copied, and version-controlled by hand. Zoho CRM helped them address that. But there was still a challenge—they needed Zoho CRM to talk with SAP ECC, as that's where the rest of the data lived. Credit limits, the product catalog, and live stock sat in SAP ECC, the group's on-premise ERP, so even with a new CRM in place, quoting meant calling the SAP team or logging in to the ERP to check, and every approved quote was still re-keyed by hand to raise the order.

Closing that gap ran into two big challenges.

• SAP ECC sits inside Khimji Ramdas's own infrastructure behind their firewall. Hence a direct integration was not possible.
• SAP ECC doesn't natively support APIs for integration. Also, there is no means to subscribe to events by default.

"In sales, a strong relationship is built on trust. Over the years, our sales team has built strong trust with our customers. Enabling our sales team with real-time data was important for us to ensure that we offer a better customer experience ."

Prashant Kumar, Group Chief Technology Officer,Khimji Ramdas

Zoho Flow's on-premise capability handled both.

Khimji Ramdas built custom webhooks against the ERP, and Zoho Flow invokes them via its on-premise agent. The agent sits inside Khimji Ramdas's own network and connects outbound to Zoho Flow, so every call runs over that secure channel rather than across the open internet. No inbound ports are opened, nothing is published, and the ERP stays exactly where the group's security policy requires it to stay. Zoho Flow initiates every exchange, so SAP ECC never has to reach out or accept a connection it wasn't built to accept.

With that connection in place, the sales reps always have access to current data. Customer records sync on a schedule and on trigger-based actions, SAP ECC articles sync so reps quote from the real catalog, and stock is checked live both on the article record and inside the quotation, where a field shows available quantity and the warehouse location holding it. Credit position is pulled the same way.

Transactions run the other way on the same connection. A prospect stays in Zoho CRM while the opportunity is live, and becomes an ERP account only once the quotation is approved: The rep completes the mandatory fields, including VAT, in Zoho CRM, Zoho Flow pushes the record through an approval process, and the business partner number returns against that record. That number makes the account reusable, so when another entity in the group deals with the same customer, the record is extended rather than rebuilt. A missing product is created in SAP ECC and syncs back so the rep can select it. And a Convert to Sales Order button turns a final quotation into an SAP ECC sales order and returns its details, removing the re-keying that was the most error-prone step in the process.

" Integrating Zoho CRM and SAP ECC has ensured that up-to-date information is available to our sales team at all times. Today, the team no longer needs to make a call to anyone in the office to get these details. All they need to do is look into Zoho CRM and get the required data. This has helped us strengthen our relationship with our customer by enhancing our customer experience."

Prashant Kumar,Group Chief Technology Officer, Khimji Ramdas

Automating the procurement process with on-premise SAP ECC and Zoho Creator

The company also has a marine division that builds infrastructure on the water—the kind of work that puts breakwaters and sea defenses along a bay. It's construction, with the added complications of doing it offshore, and it needed project management, procurement, equipment management, and inventory tracking built around how those projects actually run. The group built that in Zoho Creator.

But this left it with the same problem the sales team had. The stock level data, purchase orders, and other relevant data resided on their SAP ECC instance, and this required Zoho Flow to sync them from SAP to their Zoho Creator applications. Without a way through to the ERP, the division would have been running its projects against stale master data.

"Integrating Zoho Creator and SAP ECC using Zoho Flow has been a game changer for us. In construction, live data is critical, and the team used to go back and forth between systems. Now they have all the required information in Zoho Creator in real time."

Prashant Kumar, Group Chief Technology Officer,Khimji Ramdas

Zoho Flow serves that data over the same connection, using the same pattern. Procurement begins in Zoho Creator, where the team gathers supplier quotations and compares them. Once a decision is reached, the details pass to the SAP team to raise formally, and the resulting purchase order number comes back into Zoho Creator and links to the record that started it. Purchase requests can also be pushed from Zoho Creator into SAP ECC as drafts. Inventory stock syncs from SAP ECC into Zoho Creator, so project teams plan against real availability rather than a separate copy of it.

Benefits and ROI

"Zoho Flow is a game changer for us! Its on-prem capabilities ensured that our SAP ECC setup is integrated with other Zoho apps without compromising our security. Ensuring the team has access to up-to-date data has enabled them to make more informed, critical decisions in real time. Zoho Flow has become a critical asset to our tech stack."

Prashant Kumar,Group Chief Technology Officer,Khimji Ramdas

Duplicate data entry is a thing of the past. The approved quote that used to be re-keyed into SAP ECC by hand is generated automatically, and order-entry errors from re-keying have effectively dropped to zero. Because reps see credit limits and live stock inside Zoho CRM instead of leaving to check, quotation turnaround is faster and quotes are made against what the business can actually deliver. Management now also has a real-time view of the quote-to-order pipeline that didn't exist before.

The real story here is what Zoho Flow made possible rather than what it saved. Khimji Ramdas is building its operations on Zoho applications, and its system of record is an on-premise ERP that can't be exposed to the internet and can't initiate a connection. Every application the group builds has to work against that constraint.

Zoho Flow is the layer that lets them run two completely different processes serving two completely different divisions, a sales CRM and a marine project operation, on the same pattern. Twelve further projects are in progress across the group, with every one of them involving on-premise integration, and every one of them relying on Zoho Flow to get there.

Moving forward

The group continues to extend using the same approach, building on Zoho and connecting each new application back to SAP ECC through Zoho Flow.