Unilever Goes Global with a Transformative SAP HANA Project

Published: 01/July/2013

Reading time: 9 mins

SAP S/4HANA offers enterprises tremendous potential to go beyond performance and simplicity and deliver significant business value as part of an enterprise-wide digital transformation, but this approach must be understood, considered and incorporated into

by SAP and Partners SAPinsider – 2006 (Volume 7), January (Issue 1)

With Colgate-Palmolive increasingly sharing IT project resources around the world, they set out to improve the way they plan, monitor, and measure global IT resources and turned to an SAP application that enables companies to inventory and track resources, skills, and budgets. The result: improved project planning, management, and reporting as well as reduced IT support costs.

Even with its substantial environmental footprint, The Coca-Cola Company is leading the charge around creating more sustainable business processes. What lessons can the rest of us glean from this experience? Jeff Seabright, Coca-Cola’s VP of Environment and Water Resources, answers this question with seven pieces of advice.

When a South African retail chain, Pick n Pay, felt hindered by insufficient legacy systems, it decided to roll out a full ERP system. This profile highlights the company’s impressive IT modernization project — from building a solution around SAP for Retail to improving performance to learning important project management lessons.

Now managing 40 branded hotels, Stonebridge Companies was fortunate to experience growth — but it also faced challenges in managing that growth. Nasim Mansurov, Vice President of IT at Stonebridge, discusses the company’s search for an ERP system and the back-end process improvements it has seen post-implementation.

With more than 180,000 employees and even more data, Accenture faced a challenge: it needed to securely support its employees with accurate, real-time information. Uncover how the company’s ERP Delivery team met this challenge by building a suite of self-service web applications — and what they learned along the way.

ConAgra Foods made the decision to start consolidating its technology years ago — and today its R&D, financial, order management, IT services, data center, and supply chain management operations all run in the same SAP system landscape. So what benefits is ConAgra Foods reaping by moving to a “single version of the truth?” Find out in this deep-dive case study.

Upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 was a non-event for Bristol-Myers Squibb, chiefly because of the help it received from SAP Enterprise Support. With insights from Michael DiNovi, the biopharmaceutical company’s Director of Application Services, this profile highlights the biggest benefits the company gained from its support agreement, including better risk management, streamlined IT processes, and greater spend visibility.

For years, electrical products distributor Summit Electric Supply watched its transaction volumes rise and experienced unhindered growth; but in 2004, the company’s aging legacy system began to show signs of stress. This customer profile relates Summit’s journey of evaluating and implementing an ERP system — and the ensuing benefits and the big lesson learned after going live with SAP ERP.

After eight years of using its custom-built spend performance management reporting system, the giant consumer products company Colgate-Palmolive decided to replace it. Uncover not only why the business made the change, but how it did so by implementing SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management to reap impressive benefits — including enhanced reporting, empowered end users, and reduced dependency on IT.

As a military aircraft provider, Lockheed Martin works with suppliers ranging from large technology firms to small, niche companies with limited IT infrastructure. In this SAP customer profile, Lockheed offers insights and tips on successful supplier collaboration, including a look at its decision to implement a portal-based environment in order to make access to its new SAP ERP system as streamlined for suppliers as possible.

Burton Snowboards is not just a snowboard company — it has also expanded into skateboard and surfboard products and, as a result, watched its global network of offices, retailers, and manufacturers grow. But with this expansion, Burton realized that it needed to improve its systems for inventory, supply chain, purchasing, and customer service. Uncover Burton’s inspiring story of preparing for an upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 — and building a strong and “simple, standard, supportable” foundation.

You may know it for its dazzling circus performances, but Cirque du Soleil, at its core, is a business—and it has relied on SAP solutions for the past decade to manage its rapid growth. From accommodating the financial complexities of a global business to keeping up with an increased demand for costumes, SAP solutions like SAP ERP Financials have helped Cirque du Soleil optimize and review business processes while collecting valuable business data.

To produce its cutting-edge semiconductors and microprocessors, high-tech giant Intel needs the very latest manufacturing equipment — and those tools don’t come cheap. In this article, read how Intel used SAP technology to pay suppliers sooner and dramatically improve its discount capture rate for capital purchases from ~50% to over 95%, exceeding the corporate goal, and resulting in millions of dollars in cost savings each year.

Nu Skin, a developer and distributor of health and beauty products, has employees in 28 different countries around the world. Previously, no centralized HR system existed to collect employee data or provide standardized HR reporting. Now, Nu Skin utilizes SAP ERP Human Capital Management — and its journey to go-live is one that is truly unique.

Kraft Foods was in the midst of an enterprise-wide SAP implementation and the business realized that the best way to expand the benefits of the company’s SAP rollout was to deploy user-friendly BI applications. See how the business created a four-point plan that has served as their secret recipe for success.

LEGO building blocks have become so popular that the company decided to expand its product line to capitalize on increased growth. To make sure its legacy product development system did not hold them back, LEGO has embarked on an implementation of SAP Product Lifecycle Management, with the transition to the application broken up into four distinct phases.

To ensure employees are properly trained, businesses must provide education through materials, in-person instruction, or online training, as well as make sure employees are up to date on certifications. For General Mills — a business that employs 39,000 people worldwide — this is a tall order. To standardize employee training in the supply chain area, the company implemented SAP Enterprise Learning and RegLearn from hyperCision.

When Grupo Modelo took the step to become a more process-oriented organization, a key objective was to make sure the business processes and rules were consistent company-wide. Standardizing organizational processes would give the brewer more insight into operations, but would also create challenges specifically related to risk management.

Fleet management company ARI manages the entire life cycle and operation of a fleet vehicle for its customers, from up-front specifications and acquisition through resale, which generates a tremendous amount of transactional data. To help ARI manipulate data to spot trends and develop proactive solutions to challenges the data might reveal, the company implemented SAP BusinessObjects Explorer with SAP HANA.

In late 2011, Colgate-Palmolive implemented SAP HANA CO-PA Accelerator as a test project to enhance its profitability analysis reporting. With significant time savings on numerous brand profitability analysis processes, the company then decided to move its business warehouse and trade promotion management solutions onto the SAP HANA platform.

Unilever’s 10-year plan to double its business is ambitious to say the least, and the company knows it needs to do more than simply put additional products on the shelves. Learn how Unilever took the initial steps toward this goal and significantly reduced the time the business spent on month-end financial close processes, financial analysis, and product cost forecasting processes.