Johannesburg, 08 Sep 2006
Business solutions giant, SAP, and professional services firm, Deloitte, have entered a global alliance in which Deloitte will bring its specialist food and beverage skills to bear in providing business consulting, implementation, training and change management expertise to clients wishing to implement SAP for Consumer Goods.
Brandon Shaban, SAP Africa's retail and consumer products solution manager, says that while the SAP solution is mature, comprehensive and very successfully in use at many food and beverage manufacturers worldwide, "there are still many organisations who don't realise that there is an easy, affordable way to use information technology (IT) to lower their costs and get closer to their customers - particularly the retailers, who often dictate operational tactics within the supply chain.
"Also, the challenges in the food and beverage sector are becoming progressively more complex and manufacturers need tools that will help them be more adaptable to the market and therefore more profitable.
"Many are not aware that such tools are available or how, if they have them, to optimise them.
"With its experience in the food and beverage sector, Deloitte in association with SAP are superbly positioned to help clients with those issues."
Vanessa Klopper, senior manager Consulting's Consumer Business Practice at Deloitte, says that for food and beverage manufacturers to survive in an increasingly competitive environment where margins are low and consumers are getting fussier, "you have no choice but to introduce change into your business models and acquire the technology functionality to support the changes.
"And because the sector has unique needs, your support technology has to be designed specifically for it. 'Food' has diverse categories - ranging from powders, cans and boxes, to solids and fresh produce - each with its own manufacturing and supply characteristics. You need technology that is geared for and can comfortably handle such diversity.
"At the same time, consumers are now fiercely safety and health conscious even though they want convenience foods. So you need to be able to make quick but informed changes to recipes - and therefore production. Also, the South African consumer base is young and fickle - as opposed to the ageing consumer base in Europe and the United States. So if you want to capture and keep markets, you have to innovate products all the time.
"All of which means having the ability to accurately track consumer behaviour and market trends, do appropriate production planning and forecasting, turn product churn to your advantage, share information with retailers so as to help them close the stock-out gap, differentiate yourself through assured quality, contain costs by building a cost effective supply chain, manage food safety and compliance with tracing and tracking capabilities, and, in all other ways, more effectively manage your business risk.
"There's no way to do any of that without an integrated, industry-specific system that straddles both your internal and external operations.
"And the most affordable way to get one of those is through a templatised, best practice-based solution that is pre-configured for the industry and can therefore be implemented quickly - giving you a rapid return on investment.
"Which is why we at Deloitte have teamed up with SAP. We know from experience that SAP for Consumer Goods is the most affordable, effective way to speed development of products and recipes, manage complex procurement and payment processes in dairy and meat, optimise production planning and forecasting, and improve sales, order processing and distribution.
"And, of course, because it is based on mySAP ERP, SAP for Consumer Goods gives you advanced abilities to manage your financials and corporate governance - and the costs associated with those."
Share