When the Indian government decided to replace a complex set of national and state taxes, duties and surcharges with a single Goods and Services Tax (GST), it created both a challenge and an opportunity for CTIL Cement Division.
The GST sets new requirements for companies transporting goods between states. As per the GST rules, any shipment of goods moved more than a prescribed number of kilometers across a state border must be registered on government systems with an electronic waybill (e-waybill). The e-waybill allows inspectors to verify that each truck or train is carrying the specified goods, and that the appropriate taxes have been paid.
Users can generate e-waybills in various ways—for example, using the official web portal or mobile app, or by sending an SMS. However, for a company like CTIL Cement Division, which produces and ships around 12 million tons of cement per year, these manual approaches required staff to create, register and manage thousands of e-waybills each week.
As a result, dedicated personnel at each of CTIL Cement Division’s four plants and 192 depots spent almost eight hours per day downloading and uploading batches of spreadsheets for waybill management. Waybill creation was a paper-based workflow involving physical signatures, so each item took around five minutes to process. Compliance processes were manual too, which increased the turnaround time further.
As it looked for a way to streamline waybill processing, CTIL Cement Division also saw an opportunity to improve the integration of its IT landscape in general. The company’s internal systems were linked together by point-to-point interfaces, and it was difficult to exchange data with third parties such as the government, suppliers, dealers and transportation providers.
“Instead of just building another point-to-point solution, we decided to look at the bigger picture,” says Amit Bahl. “By building a central platform, we could not only solve the GST e-waybill challenge, but also make it much easier to add new services in the future.”