Kingslake, in partnership with Infor USA hosted The Kingslake iTea Forum on the 16th of May 2013 in Colombo. Over 75 tea professionals, representing the cream of the local tea industry including tea exporters and brokers, participated.

Tea industry stalwarts conducted highly relevant and thought-provoking presentations on various topics. These encompassed the current trends and challenges in the industry, and focused on how IT and ERP can, and does, help organisations improve their productivity, agility and efficiency, thereby boosting their overall growth.

Dr. S. Dharmavasan, Chairman of Kingslake spoke on the shift in IT we are witnessing where everything is progressing to mobile and portable format and Cloud based infrastructure. He then went on to discuss how this can provide innumerable opportunities to the tea industry, and by taking advantage of this, how we can take businesses to a new level.

Mohan Mendis, Marketing Consultant of Heritage Teas spoke on how technology can be used to gain market share in the current environment where Beverages are battling for quenching the consumer’s palate and thirst. Using a number of examples from various beverage industries, he stated how modern technology was being applied to create new products based on shifts in consumer behavior and thus how it was possible to increase market share.

Director of Finlays Colombo, Romesh Moraes, conducted his presentation on Value Addition. He emphasised the fact that Value equals Happiness, and that Happiness equals meeting Emotional and Functional needs, and how ERP creates great value and wellness to a company by allowing them to zoom into facts at any point and see where they are currently, and thereby strategise their future moves. He thanked the IT specialists both at Kingslake and Finlays for making this possible for the Finlays Board and Share Holders.

Ajith Abeyawardena, Project Manager of Qualitea Ceylon spoke about the selecting of an ERP System, including establishing a team, preparation and evaluation. He went on to say why they chose Infor SyteLine and Kingslake for their ERP solutions, and ended with a quote from Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the one that is the most responsive to change.”

Then Niren Ranasinghe, Director of the Ranfer Group, presented ‘Change or Transformation?’ – how, in the implementation of an ERP system, change management can provide a systematic and effective approach to dealing with the numerous changes that a company and its individuals encounter. Just about to go live with the SyteLine ERP solution he said that 99% of the business will be on this ERP.

Sumith Jayawickrama, General Manager of Basilur Tea spoke how he uses the Kingslake’s Tea solution based on Infor Syteline to optimise production and manage market dynamics of smaller order sizes and greater pack sizes to cater to the modern day tea consumers varying needs. Mr Jayawickrama had worked with Kingslake in implementing the software, when at MJF and now at Basilur. With the experience of having worked overseas too he said “He has seen many internationally renowned ERP products but the Kingslake Tea Solution provides the best fit for the Tea Industry.”

M. A. Sheriffdeen, Principal Business Consultant at Kingslake gave an introduction to the Kingslake Tea System, illustrating how it can help those at every level of the tea process, and showing the audience the various interfaces of their different solutions.

Explaining the reasons for the Kingslake iTea Forum, Duleep Fernando, CEO Kingslake said “Having partnered with many clients in the Tea Industry for the past 20 years providing them business solutions based on IT, we appreciate that the Industry would benefit immensely if they got together to share their experiences with each other learning new ways on how IT can help the industry become a more robust, profitable and greater worldwide force, thereby increasing market share and earnings benefiting Sri Lanka.”

There was a lot of interest shown by the audience when Ming.le, Infor’s new collaboration platform that’s integrated to the SyteLine ERP, was demonstrated. The event concluded with High Tea, giving the participants a chance to interact with each other.