Client background

Client name: A multinational food manufacturing company

Industry type: Food manufacturing

Products: Cereals and convenience food such as cookies, crackers, and toaster pastries

Operations: 180+ countries

Number of employees: 34,000

Net sales: US$ 13,547 million (2018)

Challenges

In an industry where success depends on the speed of innovation, the client needed a faster and simpler process to modify or launch products in European markets. The underlying challenge the client faced was that its global processes and platforms were fragmented. This resulted in limiting the visibility of products; it hampered coordination, and it slowed down the pace of innovation.

In addition to the diversity of systems, the client’s product information (ingredients, formula, and nutritional data) were not recorded properly—and in instances where it was recorded, the data was in SharePoint, obsolete/third-party systems, user hard drives or excel sheets. This had the potential to expose the client to regulatory risks and expensive product recalls. Given the state of its critical product information, the client could not share data with suppliers and co-manufacturers confidently and securely.

Solution

The client needed a single, standardized system to manage the end-to-end process of product modification and innovation while meeting complex quality, safety and compliance requirements. The new system was also required to assist in product development, managing food and packaging specifications, supplier portal, nutritional labelling and regulatory compliance checks (PLM).

Wipro provided the client with functional and technical consulting, and the build, data migration, testing and training for the overall solution that included:

• SAP S/4HANA for one system to design, implement, procure, manufacture, manage resources, and store information 
• SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA to track KPIs, provide end-to-end visibility to process flow, analytics and for real-time reporting 
• SAP S/4HANA system integration capability with search functionality, making it simple

Business impact

With the single, SAP-based solution in place, the client was able to:

• Accelerate innovation and product release in its European markets while meeting compliance and safety norms 
• Reduce time-to-market by 30% while maintaining the same headcount 
• Select the right projects to maximize ROI with balanced resources using data and analytics
  
• Ensure speed and agility with an increase in quality with 98.5% case fill rate for SKU to reach market, thanks to connected systems 
• Implement continuous improvement measures with access to process metrics
  

SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori are the digital foundation on which an organization can build its strategy for speed, agility, planning and process visibility. By analyzing performance metrics, organizations can implement improvement and further fuel innovation.-Sundararaman Sankaranarayanan, SAP Digital Innovation Group Head, Wipro Limited.