Lohia Corp is a machinery and industrial equipment company serving domestic and international customers. They offer a variety of spare parts and consumables for equipment that can operate for 15-20 years. Lohia’s multi-regional sales and warehouse operations required managing complicated order flows, calculating freight and insurance for products, and conducting complex price negotiations for large, multi-part orders. Business processes still relied on email, Excel, and regional methods, which caused bottlenecks for issuing proforma invoices, identifying parts, and dispatching orders.
Slow quotes, Manual Pricing Hurting Customer Experience
For Lohia Corp, the biggest pain points were in the order-to-dispatch flow. Customers had to chase the sales team for proforma invoices (PIs), and generating a single PI often took three to four days because multiple salespeople had to check part availability, freight costs by region, insurance, and discounts.
“There was a lot of email and Excel-based work, and each region had its own format. We didn’t even have a clear view of how many orders were in the pipeline,” says Jagdip Kumar, CIO at Lohia Corp.
The problem compounded on the shop floor. When a machine broke down and a customer needed a spare, downtime could stretch for days while the part was identified and priced. Many customers were running 15–20-year-old machines and had lost printed catalogs or part codes.
“The customer would send a photo on WhatsApp saying this part is broken, and it could take us a day or more to identify the part,” Kumar says. Pricing was another friction point. Large orders with 150–200 parts required lengthy back-and-forth discussions regarding discounts and non-standard items. The result was delayed dispatches, inconsistent customer experience, and lost productivity for both Lohia and its customers.
A Customer Portal to Ease Bottlenecks
Lohia Corp’s answer was a custom customer portal built on Salesforce, rolled out over six months with heavy emphasis on process standardization. The team unified quotation and PI formats across five Indian regions, standardized pricing rules, and embedded freight and insurance matrices based on part weight and dimensions—data that was previously missing in systems.
“System build time was not the biggest part. The major time went into standardizing the process and pricing across regions,” Kumar says.
A one-stop shop, the portal enables customers to create their own PIs, orders, track order status, access invoices and pay online with an all-in-one secure gateway. Discounts are auto applied in the login process with no need for back and forth email communications. Customers will no longer have to spend time comparing quotes for shipping and insurance as these are now automated online with an option for customers to pick up from the warehouse if that suits them. International customers no longer have to wait up to a week for their PI.
To reduce identification delays, Lohia moved customers from WhatsApp photos to uploading images directly on the portal.
“There is still work to do. The next step is an AI layer that matches uploaded images to engineering drawings. Legacy machines have 2D drawings, so the team is converting them to 3D and plans to offer an exploded-view catalog. The customer will select the machine number, see an exploded view, hover over an area, and the parts inside will be listed. They can simply add the parts to their cart. No part codes or catalogs needed,” Kumar explains.
The portal is complemented by WhatsApp integration for order confirmations, PI numbers, invoices, and shipment updates, similar to e-commerce notifications. On the back end, Lohia implemented RPA to auto-read and post airline freight bills and shipping line invoices arriving on a dedicated email ID, reducing manual data entry. The portal also supports intelligent order splitting. If an order has 150 parts and only 100 are in the regional fast-moving warehouse, the system automatically creates two PIs with different delivery dates, so customers know what will arrive in two days and what will arrive in eight to ten days.
Adoption is growing steadily. Lohia has onboarded about 100 customers in India and around 50 international users, with a target of 500. “Every month we try to onboard at least 5–10 customers, and we conduct training. For customers, it’s become easier as they get tracking, account statements, and can pay online,” Kumar says.
40% Faster Order Processing, Fewer Errors
All of this impact is seen at speed, consistency, and customer experience. The duration that takes to get a transaction processed has been reduced by an estimated 40% with some taking minutes rather than days.
Customers can place orders even when the sales team is unavailable, and they no longer wait for a PI to be emailed. Discount and pricing negotiations have reduced significantly because applicable discounts are visible upfront. Freight and insurance automation has removed another source of delay.
For Lohia customers, the portal translates into better control and reduced downtime. They can now look at their order history, invoices, track orders, and even pay online! For Lohia, this leads to lesser manual errors, clearer view into the order-creation cycle and a strong, clean data base for analytics and reporting. The RPA automation for freight and import bills further reduces manual effort and speeds up postings.
