Integrate Non-SAP countries with JDE standard ways of working. Jacobs Douwe Egberts is a Dutch privately owned company that owns numerous beverage brands. It was formed in 2015 following the merger of the coffee division of Mondelez International with Douwe Egberts. After the merger, JDE is now the number two coffee company in the world after Nestle. Consultants from Bolders Consulting Group have been supporting JDE since 2014 through involvement in different projects in achieving JDE’s sales goal of 5000 cups of coffee per second.
To achieve this goal, it was very important to have harmonized business and IT processes throughout the organization across the globe with one way of working. With a lot of emphasis on the standardization, JDE has been running different programs since 2014 and Project “Kauri” was one of the initiatives in that direction. The mains goal of the Kauri Project is to integrate countries that were not using SAP into the common SAP system of JDE and to harmonize their business & IT processes following a JDE standard template. The project aims to move from different traditional legacy systems to one ERP system across the globe for business. The project was very challenging in terms of its timelines and scope including different countries like Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. This required in-depth knowledge of the JDE business processes as well as their IT systems in order to understand the existing processes from different countries and map them to the JDE template. The Project also focused on training new users in multiple countries with different backgrounds. Challenges:
Impact assessment due to geographical expansion
With the addition of new geographical locations in the planning network, it was very
important to assess the panning jobs in order to have consistent planning across all time
zones. The existing system was designed for EMEA region and some changes were
needed here in order to accumulate new time zones especially the network between
Asia-Pacific and Europe.
Master Data extraction from the legacy systems
One of the major challenges of this project was to extract the Master data from multiple
legacy system into the SAP system. As there was no SAP system implemented for these
countries, the source of data was from multiple legacy systems and different per
country. It was very important to assess the kind of data that was available and how to
transform it into the required form. It required creation of new data flows in some cases.
Change Management
Change management was one of the most important topics throughout the project. As
multiple users from different backgrounds were involved and were used to working in
their own set ways, it was important to understand this but at the same time guide them
into the new way of working and how it better achieved organization goals. As new
functionalities like Demand Planning, Supply planning and Production scheduling were
being rolled out to leverage the planning capabilities of APO system, there was a
considerable change for the users from a system perspective as well as from a business
process perspective as the business processes needed to be streamlined to support new
system functions.
Communication/Alignment with local teams
Communication was another challenge in this project due to different time zone and
languages. As all time zones were included in this Project; Asia, America, Europe with
different languages, it was a challenge to communicate and align with local teams. To
run the project of this scale, everyone needed to speak the same language and have the
same understanding. With patience and good methods of communication, we overcame
these challenges. Another Important aspect of the Project was to train people from
different backgrounds, different mindsets and different knowledge levels of the SAP
system.
Setting up the Forecasting and Promotion
Process
Setting up Forecasting Process for these countries was really challenging as the people
were so used to working with Excel that it became a real challenge to convince them to
use the APO capabilities to generate forecasts. It took lot of effort and workshops with
our consultants to show what could be achieved with APO Demand Planning system.
Another aspect was the Promotion Loading Process where countries have their own
Promo tools and it is important to have seamless interface with these Promo tools.
Solutions:
Re-design the whole Planning jobs structure
In order to fit different time zones, whole Process chains has been re-designed to ensure
consistent and accurate planning across the globe. Introduction to multiple parallel
processing profiles and parallelization of the process chains made it possible to finish all
the jobs well before business start times and gave the users accurate planning results.
New flows to load Master and Transactional Data
In order to get the correct master data from legacy systems in required format,
consultants worked with local teams to identify the gaps. New flows were introduced so
that accurate Master and Transaction data could be loaded into future SAP system. New
reports were introduced to help the business analyse their data.
Forecasting and Promotion Process Set-up
To leverage the full capabilities of the APO Demand Planning, Consultants worked with
local teams to help them with their product portfolio segmentation, setting up the
forecast generation jobs using appropriate forecasting models and parameters. Several
tests were performed to finalize the forecasting models and finetune the parameters.
For Promotion loading, a new process was introduced where Planners can directly
upload the Promotion volumes directly in APO Planning books.
Continuous alignment with local teams
Detailed workshops were organised during the initial phase of the project with the
business in order to explain the JDE template/way of working and identify the gaps.
Solutions were proposed to close the gaps and the consultants worked on preparing the
functional and technical designs as per the business requirements. There were
continuous alignment meetings with the local teams to share the progress, achievements
and problems faced during the whole project. Consultants from Bolders Consulting
Group worked very closely with their business counterparts from JDE and were involved
in every part of the project including design, build, testing, training and cut-over
execution.
Well Prepared training material
In order to train people on SAP, very well-prepared training material was written which
was then translated into local languages to provide better understanding to local users.
In addition to traditional PowerPoints, important trainings were recorded in small
videos for reference in future.
Results:
Overall, consultants from Bolders Consulting Group worked very hard with all
stakeholders including local teams, JDE business counter parts and other functional
teams and leverage their past experience to ensure the smooth go-live with no issues.
The successful implementation of the project brought the following benefits for JDE:
One system across the globe.
Streamlined business processes for the complete organization.
Improved IBP Process.Visibility of Demand and Supply situation in E2E Supply chain help in improving IBP
processes.
Improvement in forecast accuracy across product lines.
With Demand Planning capabilities of APO system, the forecast accuracy has been
improved across Product lines.
Standardized Master Data.
All master data has been harmonized across the organization
Improved visibility and decision-making.
Using one system across organization, it gives more visibility to the Management
Reduction in Inventory Cost
Using APO functionalities including Demand Planning, Supply planning and
scheduling capabilities of APO, it results in maintaining the required stock level and
reduction in overall inventory cost