In a 15-month, 800-user greenfield project, Britehouse has moved JSE-listed AVI, supplier of some of South Africa's best known food, beverage and fashion brands, to SAP ECC6 and a fully automated warehouse scanning capability.
AVI brands include Five Roses, Freshpak, Frisco, House of Coffees, Koffiehuis, Ellis Brown, Bakers, Pyotts, Provita, Willards, I&J, Yardley, Lenth'eric, Coty, Spitz, Carvela, Kurt Geiger and Lacoste.
The implementation focused on the Entyce, Snackworks, Financial Shared Service, Logistics Support Services and AVI International business units of AVI.
A hidden risk in greenfield implementations for many organisations, however, is the temptation simply to transfer the processes they used in their previous ERP system to SAP, twisting SAP to suit the methodologies that have not been working for them and for which they are probably moving to SAP in the first place.
“AVI were extremely careful to avoid falling into that trap, keeping only those very few bespoke processes that would not benefit from a shift to SAP best practice,” says Britehouse Integration Manager, John Barnes. “This helped to keep the project simple and give AVI full value from their new SAP system, in terms of comprehensive performance improvement right across the organisation.”
Britehouse also mitigated overall project risk by initially taking live only one of AVI's 11 regions: KZN. Having proved the concept, with one million cases of product being shipped with minimal impact to business and to service levels, immediately after go-live, Britehouse took the rest of the South African regions live three months later. The final rollout included AVI International with operations in countries like Botswana and Zambia.
Splitting the project for proof-of-concept meant having AVI operate on two different systems for three months.
“By tightly limiting the number of interfaces between the two systems and putting the correct interim business processes in place, we were able to produce accurate balance sheets and income statements with a minimum amount of fuss,” Barnes says.
Britehouse managed all configuration and documentation for the new SAP system using SAP Solution Manager, ensuring ongoing ease-of-management of the system by AVI's in-house SAP support team.
User training threatened to be challenging because it took place while changes to AVI's processes were being made to fit with SAP best practice - and an electronic training delivery system proved unwieldy.
“However, management, Eventus (now part of Britehouse) and the Britehouse consultancy team worked together closely to produce appropriate documentation and, thereby, get the training done on time. Training took place seven days a week and AVI businesses were committed to the training effort, thereby ensuring the success,” Barnes says.
“In addition, we had invaluable commitment and support from the AVI's project sponsors. They'd had previous experience of SAP implementations and were therefore able to manage the business' expectations, commitment and buy-in superbly. The AVI's project sponsors and business process owners were also immovable from the philosophy of 'keep it simple, keep it standard, make it work', which contributed greatly to our ability to deliver the project on time, in budget, successfully.”
“The AVI project has been an important one for us in demonstrating to the market that we're as skilled in FMCG as we're known to be in manufacturing, mining and warehousing, where we made our initial mark,” says Britehouse SAP Specialist Division business development executive, Hendri Pretorius.
“Perhaps more significantly, however, the AVI project is important to us because it has enabled us to, once again, build a long-term relationship with a customer. AVI has chosen to exploit our SAP skills further by involving us in ongoing business improvement projects such as recipe and third-party sales order management based on their new SAP system.”
Britehouse undertook the AVI SAP implementation on a fixed price basis.
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