Multi-phase Oracle ERP implementation for the largest manufacturer of vitamins and nutrition products
About Client
This organization is one of the largest manufacturers, distributor, and retailer of vitamins, nutritional supplements and related products in the United States. They employed over 11,000 people to manage their manufacturing plants, distribution centers and retail stores with over 47 years of history, grew organically and was selling over 40 major brands through Enterprise, Retail, and Direct to Consumer channels.
Business Challenges
Demand for wellness products typically depend on seasonal health advisory and market consumption is driven by products availability. Due to the unpredictable nature of their business, the company was always having either excess inventory impacting the bottom-line or product shortages impacting their top-line, excess inventory was.
Their 30 years old AS400 based legacy ERP system and other 300 plus business supporting systems led to several manual touch processes resulting in heavy usage of excel and email communications for operations. With over 50,000 SKUs across various brands, product sales forecasting, supply planning, procurement, production planning, inventory planning, warehouse operations, and transportation and Order fulfillment lacked sophisticated systems to manage business operations causing them millions of dollars of lost opportunities and excessive spend.
And therefore, they required to implement a robust business process solution to keep ahead of the competition, reduces overhead costs, and improve cash flow. From a technology point of view, the diverse existing systems, built on heterogeneous technology platforms required replacement with a best-in-class ERP system that can support the Omnichannel business.
Solution
After much thought and evaluation, the client felt that Oracle ERP is best suited for their IT Environment because it offers several best of the breed capabilities such as Value Chain Planning, PLM, Retail Point of Sale & Merchandising, Trade Promotions Management and Transportation Management system, etc. We have worked with a customer in excerpting platform by providing a frame of reference on various capabilities of Oracle for their relevance, assessment of current processes & systems and developed future state capability and system architecture, business benefits case, Implementation roadmap and cost estimations for board approval. A multi-phase Oracle ERP roadmap was finalized to implement future state capabilities as per roadmap.
Phase-1: Foundational capabilities to lay a strong foundation for Master Data Management, Financials accounting and reporting, product life cycle management and CRM.
Phase-2: Implemented New capabilities that do not exist in the Organization and also replaced old systems.
Phase-3: Advanced planning capabilities that would further improve the business processes and spur the growth were implemented in this phase.
Phase-4: Capabilities which has a direct impact on revenue improvement and cost savings were implemented.
Phase-5: Is to enable Order to Cash, Manufacturing and Warehouse Management capabilities that are core to the customer business in stages to ensure business continuity.
Business Benefits
Company-wide business transformation initiative resulted in several tangible and non-tangible business benefits
Process Improvements: Resulted in continuous improvement of the process which Increased inventory turn and enabled the company to become efficient and agile.
New Capabilities: The newly added capabilities led to visibility across the value chain.IT Application Portfolio Rationalization: No more manual process, all the automated processes with ERP systems reduced IT costs over 40%.
Modernization: Our holistic approach helped customer to come out of their digital disruption and resulted in an end to end IT Modernization.
Cost Savings: Estimated cost savings of over 400 million in 5 year period which helped the company to sustain in the current market and compete.
