Distell is SA`s largest alcohol and beverage company selling approximately 330 million litres of wine, spirits and fruit alcoholic beverages.
In 2000 Distell`s top management team decided to focus on developing and implementing an e-business strategy that would enhance the effectiveness of the business systems and procedures to support the company`s global goals.
According to Naas van Rooyen, the Group E-business manager at Distell, the company wanted to transact and communicate electronically with its customers, agents and suppliers. Distell also wanted to reduce costs by optimising the supply chain, whilst at the same time increasing sales and improving customer service levels.
"Through our e-business initiative, we wanted to empower our employees to communicate, share information and collaborate with each other," he says
The company tasked Affinity Logic, a focused retail consumer goods IT solution provider, to help it achieve these business aims.
Distell had identified specific areas that required attention and these included:
* Closer integration with suppliers on production requirements
* Improvement in administration costs and procurement visibility
* Improvement of demand requirements from international customers
* Automate procurement processes, sales processes and web-enable international agent interaction
According to Chris Shortt, e-business executive at Affinity Logic, at the stage of Affinity Logic getting involved, Distell was in the process of evaluating solutions that would provide the best integration to its existing systems.
"Affinity Logic`s approach recommended developing the solution as an extension of Distell`s SAP platform to leverage investment in the SAP platform, and benefit from real-time integration," he says.
Between September 2001 and mid February 2002 Distell and Affinity Logic implemented a variety of pilot initiatives with selected partners, which have now been completed successfully. These initiatives were completed within time and in budget.
Distell is currently rolling out these initiatives to the rest of its trading partner communities globally and within Southern Africa.
The initiative involved four aspects: buy-side integration; sell-side integration; development of a web-based collaborative forecasting tool; and the development of a web-based catalogue and ordering system.
On the buy-side integration side, a pilot was done with Nampak Corrugated and was completed in September 2001. This project entailed the integration of Distell`s SAP system and procurement processes with Nampak Corrugated at a system-to-system level, to enable a full `purchase to pay` cycle.
The sell-side integration project was done with SPAR - a key customer - and entailed the integration of Distell`s SAP system and sales processes with SPAR at a system-to-system level for the order placement and confirmation process. This system went live in November 2001.
Affinity Logic developed a fully integrated, web-based collaborative forecasting tool for Distell`s international agents to input and manage their forecasts of Distell product purchases. This was piloted with Distell`s Africa North and West region, and went live in February 2002.
The final pilot went live in mid February with 10 Distell customers in Southern Africa. This pilot involved a B2B Internet sales catalogue-based ordering facility, for integrating customers in the sales processes.
"The e-business initiative was a learning curve for Distell. Trade partner buy-in was absolutely key to the success of these initiatives," adds van Rooyen.
Commenting on the integration with SAP, Shortt says: "SAP works in an e-business environment. It is very open and is fully extensible to enable process innovation as initiated by Distell.
"Through this project it became clear that integration difficulties are harder to overcome than functionality deficiencies, thus an integrated solution is more valuable than an `interfaced` solution."
Another outcome of the project was that Distell found the quality of data driving their SAP system and Key trading partners` systems was poorer than expected, and the initiatives forced a thorough review and cleansing of all data within the trading systems.
Van Rooyen concludes: "This project has allowed us to establish an enduring platform for our e-business initiatives that will allow Distell to expand the business significantly in the years to come."
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