Hashwani Group: eight export companies on one system

The group

Founded in 1984 and headquartered on I.I. Chundrigar Road in Karachi, Hashwani Group has grown into eight operating companies shipping to South Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Hassan Ali Rice Export Company has been part of Pakistan's rice trade since the 1960s. Syndicate Mineral Export Company and Micro Grind Minerals mine, process and transport chromium and chrome ore. Stonyx extracts marble, including the premium Verona grade, from quarries in Balochistan and Sindh. The Himalayan Rock Salt Company hand-mines and exports rock salt, WholeSome Foods handles frozen fruits and vegetables, Marvel Foodstuff Trading LLC anchors the group in the Gulf, and Zeh Creations serves the creative side of the portfolio.

Eight companies, eight product lines, multiple currencies and tax jurisdictions, mines, warehouses, cold storage and ports. And until recently, eight completely separate ways of keeping the books.

The problem: a group that could not see itself

Every company was its own island. Eight different systems were in use - three legacy desktop accounting packages, two outdated ERP installations and three businesses running entirely on Excel. Rice was tracked by lot and moisture grade, ore by tonnage and grade, marble by block and slab. Nothing spoke to anything else.

Consolidation was a monthly ordeal. Producing a group view meant collecting trial balances from every company, re-keying them into a master spreadsheet, eliminating inter-company transactions by hand and reconciling the mismatches. It took four people twelve days every month, and the numbers reached the boardroom three weeks old.

Inter-company transactions were a black hole. When Micro Grind transported ore for Syndicate Mineral, or Marvel Foodstuff in the UAE bought from Hassan Ali Rice in Karachi, the entry was booked twice and the two rarely matched. At any time, 34 inter-company balances worth roughly PKR 48 million sat unreconciled.

Export documentation was slow and fragile. Each container needed a proforma invoice, commercial invoice, packing list, Form-E references, certificate-of-origin details and bank documentation for the letter of credit - the same shipment details re-typed six times across six documents. A single typo could hold a shipment at the port or delay LC payment by weeks, and did so around seven times a month.

Inventory lived in people's heads. Rice across four warehouses, ore stockpiles at the mine and the port, marble blocks at the quarry against slabs at the processing yard, frozen goods in cold storage - none of it visible in real time. Physical counts happened twice a year and variance ran at 9 per cent.

Compliance was a fire drill. With companies registered under FBR for income and sales tax, SRB for Sindh services tax and Marvel Foodstuff under UAE FTA VAT, every filing period meant pulling data from different systems and reformatting it - roughly 60 hours a month on returns alone.

Why AmalERP

The group evaluated five options, including two international enterprise suites and two local vendors. Several were ruled out on cost - enterprise licensing for eight entities would have run past PKR 25 million upfront plus annual maintenance - and others because they treated multi-company consolidation, Pakistani tax compliance and export documentation as expensive add-ons rather than core features.

Multi-company was built in rather than bolted on: each company runs as its own legal entity with its own chart of accounts, tax registrations and currency, rolling up automatically into a group view, with inter-company transactions posted once and mirrored in both companies.

Compliance was native. FBR digital invoicing, sales tax returns, withholding tax and SRB came as standard, and UAE FTA VAT was available on the same platform for Marvel Foodstuff.

Being cloud-based mattered more than expected. Mine sites in Balochistan, the quarry in Sindh, warehouses in Karachi, the Dubai office and head office all work on the same live data, with no servers to maintain and no end-of-day backups sent over WhatsApp.

And it could model genuinely different businesses without custom development: rice by lot, grade and moisture; ore by tonnage and grade; marble by block and slab dimensions; frozen goods by batch and expiry.

The rollout

Phased over six months, with Switcher Techno's team working alongside the group's finance and operations staff.

Phase 1 (8 weeks) took head office and Hassan Ali Rice Export Company live first - a unified group chart of accounts, five years of migrated history, and lot-based inventory, contract sales and LC-linked export documentation. Month-end close for the rice business fell from 15 days to 5 in the first quarter.

Phase 2 (7 weeks) brought on Syndicate Mineral Export, Micro Grind Minerals and Stonyx, with weighbridge tonnage, ore-grade tracking, quarry-to-yard block movements and transport job costing. Inter-company billing between Micro Grind's transport operation and Syndicate's exports was automated for the first time.

Phase 3 (6 weeks) covered The Himalayan Rock Salt Company, WholeSome Foods with batch and expiry tracking for cold storage, Zeh Creations, and Marvel Foodstuff Trading LLC in the UAE with FTA VAT configured.

Phase 4 (3 weeks) switched on automated consolidation, inter-company eliminations and real-time group dashboards. In total 140 staff were trained across 11 locations, including mine-site teams who had never used an ERP before.

Group visibility

For the first time in the group's history, the directors open a single dashboard and see cash, receivables, payables, stock and profitability for all eight companies - individually and consolidated - in real time.

Group consolidation went from 12 days to 40 minutes. Group month-end close went from 15 days to 5. The 34 unreconciled inter-company balances went to zero. Board reporting went from three weeks old to same day, and an ad-hoc director query that used to take two to three days is now answered in under a minute.

Export operations

Shipment documents are generated from the sales order and pushed through proforma, commercial invoice, packing list and LC documentation without re-keying.

Documentation time per container fell from 6 hours to 20 minutes. Documentation errors causing port or bank delays fell from 7 a month to between zero and one. The shipment-to-LC-payment cycle fell from 45 days to 15. The same team now processes 180 export containers a month, up from 60.

Inventory and working capital

Every warehouse, mine stockpile, quarry yard and cold-storage unit reports into one live stock position.

Stock variance at physical count fell from 9 per cent to 0.9 per cent. Working capital tied up in excess stock fell from PKR 120 million to PKR 40 million, releasing PKR 80 million. Stock-outs on confirmed export orders fell from 18 a year to 2, and frozen-goods wastage from expiry fell from 6 per cent to 2 per cent.

Compliance and finance productivity

Time spent on FBR, SRB and FTA returns fell from 60 hours a month to 6. Around 2,400 FBR digital invoices are now issued automatically each month, where previously none were, and there have been no late-filing penalties since go-live.

Manual journal entries fell from 1,500 a month to 150. Finance staff tied up in consolidation went from four to one, redeploying three people and roughly 480 hours a month from data entry to analysis.

What is next

The group is extending AmalERP into production costing at the marble processing yard, a customer portal for international buyers, bank integration for automated LC tracking, and WhatsApp-based order confirmations for Gulf clients. With core operations unified, each new company or product line can now be added in about three weeks rather than months.