Eswaran Brothers Exports goes live with ‘Grow with SAP’

 Achieves milestone for Sri Lanka’s tea industry

 Implementation delivered by Samishti Infotech connects entire tea value chain — from auction to export — on a single, real-time platform

Eswaran Brothers Exports Ltd., one of Sri Lanka’s leading value-added tea exporters, has gone live with Grow with SAP, SAP’s cloud ERP offering built on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition — marking the first such implementation in Sri Lanka’s tea industry. 

The project was designed and delivered by Samishti Infotech Ltd., an SAP implementation partner, working closely with the Eswaran Brothers team over several months to build what both companies describe as the first customised SAP ERP solution developed specifically for the unique requirements of the tea trade.

The go-live brings together every stage of Eswaran Brothers’ operations — tea auctions, procurement, broker payments and advances, private purchases, imports of organic teas, blending, production and export documentation — onto a single integrated platform, replacing what had been a more fragmented set of systems and processes built up over decades of rapid growth.

Founded in 1963, Eswaran Brothers Exports began, as its Vice Chairman Subramaniam Eassuwaren recalls in a company video marking the milestone, from far humbler beginnings: “My grandfather started this as a small grocery shop.” 

More than eight decades on, the third-generation family business has grown into one of Sri Lanka’s leading exporters of value-added tea, with an end-to-end value chain spanning tea auctions, procurement, blending, manufacturing and packaging design, and exports to customers in more than 57 countries.

That scale is precisely what made the case for a modern ERP system so pressing. “As a fast-growing tea [business], managing such a complex value chain requires complete accuracy and quality control across many processes,” Eassuwaren said. “There are many important quality decisions we have to take as we add value for our customers and our people. Our team needed a new operating system — a brain that is ready for data-driven, information-based, AI-supported decision-making.”

That need was compounded by the sheer diversity of transaction types running through the business at any given time — tea bought at auction, tea bought privately from brokers and estates, organic tea brought in through imports, and finished goods moving out to buyers across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America and beyond, each with its own documentation, quality checks and payment terms.

Rather than adapting a generic, off-the-shelf ERP template, Eswaran Brothers and Samishti Infotech opted to build the implementation around how the tea business actually functions on the ground. Eswaran Brothers Exports Chairman Ganesh Deivanayagam said:  “With Samishti Infotech, we created and implemented a customised SAP ERP solution, developed specifically around the unique requirements of the tea industry — the first of its kind. We now have an ERP solution designed specifically to connect our key processes — from tea auction and procurement to broker advances and even private purchases and imports of organic teas — linking one part of the business to another on one integrated platform.”

The new system is built directly around the physical and commercial movement of tea: from auction collection and transport planning, through blending and production, to export documentation and shipment. Live views of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud environment shown during the go-live demonstrate sales orders, delivery status and fulfilment data being tracked in real time — a marked shift from manual reconciliation across disconnected spreadsheets and legacy tools.

Traceability was a particular focus. The new platform gives Eswaran Brothers full, barcode-supported tracking of every bag of tea that enters its operations, strengthening quality control and audit trails from the point of purchase through to the finished, packaged product. That capability is increasingly important for Sri Lankan tea exporters more broadly: the country’s tea sector earned an estimated $1.51 billion in export revenue in 2025, retaining its position among the world’s top five tea-exporting nations, even as exporters face tightening supply-chain traceability and sustainability disclosure requirements from key overseas markets, including the European Union’s deforestation and green-claims regulations coming into effect over the next two years. A digitally traceable, auditable supply chain — of the kind Eswaran Brothers has now built — positions the company well ahead of that curve.

For Deivanayagam, the value of the new system lies as much in the quality of information it produces as in the processes it automates. “We now have a system that captures everything, and it is helping my team easily access the information they need to make important commercial decisions,” he said. “As our business grows rapidly, we are building a more connected and efficient organisation, supported by a solution that is specifically designed for the unique needs of our business — and, I believe, for the tea industry as well.”

That last point is one both companies were keen to underline: with this go-live, Eswaran Brothers is not simply digitising its own back office, but establishing what it hopes will become a reference model for digital transformation across Sri Lanka’s broader tea sector — an industry that remains, for many operators, reliant on manual processes despite its outsized contribution to national export earnings.