Why CarDekho Replaced SAP with Oracle Ahead of IPO
As digital automotive solutions provider CarDekho gears up for its IPO, the company is placing technology at the core of its financial transformation. The 18-year-old platform, which has grown into a multi-vertical enterprise spanning used car sales, financing, insurance, mobility, and fleet services, relies on Oracle’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to streamline its financial operations. Speaking to AIM, Aditya Changoiwala, group financial controller at CarDekho, highlighted this partnership. Referring to the books of account closures, Changoiwala said, “We had a 15-day closing cycle, and our target is to bring it down to around seven days with Oracle solutions.” With the IPO on the horizon, he stressed that technology is central to this effort and helps provide real-time insights to leadership teams. The platform enables them to shift from manual, time-consuming data entry to a more automated data-driven approach. Moving from SAP to Oracle Before switching to Oracle, CarDekho was running on an outdated, on-prem version of SAP. According to Changoiwala, the system was “primitive”, lacked enhancements, and struggled to support the company’s evolving needs, especially after acquiring several businesses. “We were actually spending a lot of money on maintaining the server and doing maintenance,” he said. “In the last couple of years, we had acquired a few companies and were finding it difficult to integrate them into SAP. Moreover, scalability was an issue.” After evaluating several solutions, the company selected Oracle for its cloud-based ERP, EPM, and SCM modules. Oracle Cloud ERP operates on a pay-as-you-go model, eliminating the need for significant upfront investments in hardware and infrastructure that traditional on-premise SAP systems require. This leads to substantial savings in operational and maintenance costs, allowing companies to manage budgets better and reallocate funds towards innovation and growth. Explaining the challenges with SAP, Changoiwala said that their new businesses are on the cloud, for which they could not maintain a separate team. Moreover, as SAP is on-prem, the updates were not available there. “Even if you want to update or upgrade to the other version, it’s a separate implementation cycle that you must go through,” he said. “We thought if we were to move on to the cloud-based server, we would get all the advantages of SaaS, and then we wouldn’t have to maintain the infrastructure, and all the updates that Oracle releases every quarter,” he added. Changoiwala said that the implementation was phased. “We have already implemented ERP. We are in the process of implementing EPM. In another couple of months, we start on the SCM journey.” The objective was to consolidate systems and reduce reliance on Excel and fragmented processes. CarDekho is not alone in moving away from SAP. According to Oracle, in 2021 alone, over a hundred companies replaced SAP with Oracle. India Pistons, an auto parts maker, is another company that switched to Oracle ERP. After moving from legacy systems to Oracle Cloud, operational costs were cut by 30% to 40%, and productivity was boosted by reducing manual work. The company also reassigned staff to more valuable tasks. Global examples include companies such as Batelco, ClayCo and Lovisa. Moreover, many SAP customers face challenges with the company’s complex and heavily customised platforms, unclear migration paths to S/4HANA, and fragmented data models. Oracle Cloud offers a more streamlined, future-ready suite of applications that enable faster implementation and quicker realisation of business value. Why Oracle? By using Oracle’s capabilities, CarDekho aims to improve financial reporting and deliver real-time insights crucial for the business to achieve financial prudence across business units. With expansion plans across Southeast Asia and the Middle East underway, the company has turned to Oracle’s cloud-based ERP solutions to address challenges related to scalability, integration, and reporting. In the last 18 months, CarDekho has taken three modules from Oracle, including ERP, enterprise performance management (EPM), and supply chain management (SCM), which are in different stages of implementation across businesses. With a turnover of ₹3,000 crore annually, Changoiwala said the company is EBITDA positive at the parent level, while some businesses are still in development stages. Standardisation and Real-Time Insights CarDekho’s finance operations now run on Oracle ERP, supporting day-to-day accounting, invoicing, and statutory financial reporting. “The base job is right now on ERP,” Changoiwala said. “All the statutory reporting that we are doing in terms of making our financials…is being done using ERP.” One of the main advantages has been the move towards standardisation. “Now most of our businesses are on the same instance. We get real-time information around their closing,” he said. “We don’t have to rely on Excel sheets. We’re able to get a consolidated view.” While the ERP system is still stabilising, Changoiwala expects further value once Oracle’s EPM module goes live. “Internal Management Information System (MIS) and budgeting should go live in another quarter,” he said. “That’s when we’ll be able to have a better view of revenue forecasts.” Early Steps Towards AI Adoption While generative AI isn’t yet a core part of CarDekho’s finance operations, there’s active interest in automation through AI agents. “We are looking at using AI agents to automate standard processes,” Changoiwala said. “I have a big team that spends a lot of time digging into data and doing repetitive tasks. That’s where we’re trying to leverage Oracle’s AI capabilities.” As for generative AI, Changoiwala believes it’s not yet ready for deeper analytical tasks. “It can definitely collate data and summarise it. While it is for good decision-making, I think it’s still far off.” CarDekho’s embrace of Oracle shows how finance teams are replacing outdated processes with cloud-first platforms that drive speed, consistency, and scalability, laying the groundwork for IPOs and future tech adoption.
In 2021 alone, over a hundred companies replaced SAP with Oracle.
As digital automotive solutions provider CarDekho gears up for its IPO next week, the company is placing technology at the core of its financial transformation. The 18-year-old platform, which has grown into a multi-vertical enterprise spanning used car sales, financing, insurance, mobility, and fleet services, relies on Oracle’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to streamline its financial operations.  
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Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.