Client profile Eckes-Granini is a leading European fruit juice and fruit beverage company. Headquartered in Neider-Olm near the city of Mainz, Germany, the company is a family-owned enterprise with subsidiaries in 15 European countries, including Austria, Belgium, France, Hungary, Spain and Switzerland. It also exports its products—leading brands such as Granini, Hohes C, Yo, Joker and Pago—to more than 70 countries around the world.

Business challenge Faced with rising raw material costs and changing consumer preferences, Eckes-Granini wanted to streamline its supply chain to reduce costs and increase sales. The company's IT legacy systems were also aging. To face these business challenges, the company launched a strategic program to:

• Reduce the cost of raw materials through efficient procurement and better working capital management.

• Explore the possibility of using A/B/C grade raw materials through optimized blending instructions to reduce costs.

• Strengthen its position in the market by adopting established business processes.

• Upgrade and harmonize its IT landscape.

How Accenture helped Accenture leveraged its global delivery presence to support Eckes-Granini in its SAP rollout initiative—HiScore. Accenture helped the company by acting as the solution driver for the following phases of the project:

• Business blueprint—this phase documented the business processes that the company wanted to implement in the system.

• Master process list—this was a key tool used in the SAP implementation to capture the scope of the project, drive the planning and manage configuration and testing phases.

• Fit/gap analysis—this phase identified whether the present system fit the requirements and if any such gaps were identified, they were recorded in a prescribed format.

• Functional design—this phase documented the system’s functions and features that were needed to satisfy the business requirements.

• Technical design—this phase documented how the business requirements were addressed on the company’s chosen technical platform.

• Configurations—in this phase, the requirements contained in the business blueprint were configured in the system.

Eckes-Granini: IT Optimization using SAP and Accenture Advanced Enterprise Solutions (AAES)

• Testing—in this phase, the requirements were tested to minimize failures.

• Deployment—in this phase, all master data were been loaded into the SAP system.

• Application Maintenance—the complete SAP ERP Maintenance was managed by Accenture out of the Accenture Delivery Centers in India and Germany.

• The SAP version used in this program was SAP ECC 6.

The team leveraged AAES process models for the Consumer Goods industry to jumpstart the initiative. AAES for Consumer Goods is an innovative and comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that supports organizations in their ERP-based and customer relationship management (CRM)-based transformation, and anticipates and resolves the related challenges. This comprehensive solution allowed the company to achieve faster, cost-effective and lower risk implementation of ERP-based business transformation programs, and focused on improving processes and activities shown to add business value.

Accenture joined several template alignment workshops with SAP and Eckes-Granini process specialists to gain client-specific insights. Accenture also leveraged its existing local and global shared service model tailored to the Consumer Goods industry and brought in its specialist skills in areas such as procure-to-pay (PTP), order-to-cash (OTC) and forecast-to-deliver (FTD) to balance local flexibility with central process harmonization.

High performance delivered

The SAP rollout has helped Eckes-Granini build a robust platform for future growth. The Accenture team leveraged AAES to conduct more than 250 client workshops, involving six countries at one location, in just 12 weeks—an activity that would have taken at least nine months without AAES. Eckes-Granini was also able to save approximately 20 percent effort during the design, build, test and support phases of the implementation by using AAES building blocks.

Thanks to this SAP implementation, Eckes-Granini has transformed its operations. The company is now able to:

• Execute business strategies for cross-entity mergers and acquisitions with the ability to quickly integrate new companies.

• Improve growth with post-merger integration as the tools and processes are built.

• Reduce raw material costs by consuming A/B/C grade materials and centralizing purchasing activities through better planning, forecasting and reporting.

• Strengthen its competitive position in the market by upgrading business processes and efficiently managing working capital through centralized planning and forecasting.

• HiScore was the company’s biggest program and now with its completion, Eckes-Granini will be able to execute even bigger projects in future.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 293,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$28.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2013. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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