Smollan Holdings, the largest FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) agency in South Africa, has taken a step into the future of supply chain management by installing BPCS V6.0.0.4, Systems Software Associates` enterprise resource planning application suite. Smollan is going live at the end of June, inside six months, and with a low implementation cost of R1 per rand of software licensed. "BPCS will give us the ideal platform on which to stabilise our business applications and provide value-added, business intelligence services," says Smollan IT manager Mike King. Smollan is the FMCG agent for, among others, Langeberg, Ceres, Bokomo/Sasko, Chaka, Steers, Federal Marine and Kimberly Clark. It provides sales and merchandising service to manufacturers in the FMCG industry, ensuring their products are optimally represented with retailers and wholesalers. In addition, it manages all field marketing for Unilever and, through two dedicated divisions it does tactical retail work for companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and ensures specific food companies` products are represented in restaurants and canteens. Smollan had for some years been running its own home-grown AS/400-based systems at its offices in Johannesburg, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, says King. "We chose to implement a package solution and after an exhaustive search which embraced 20 packages, we chose BPCS," says King. The project began in January 1997 when a team embracing five business users, two IT staff and a consultant defined major processes. These were expanded to minor processes. From these processes Smollan was able to define precise requirements and BPCS, with its supply chain focus, tight integration and high level of configurability, was the best fit. "In addition, BPCS has a strong electronic commerce focus, and we are totally committed to electronic trading," says King. To support its electronic trading, Smollan has installed a call centre. Orders are either phoned in to the call centre or fulfilled via electronic data interchange (EDI), with the result that paper has been taken out of the order fulfilment loop. Smollan operates six days a week, fulfilling many thousands of orders and transactions a day. "The combination of BPCS and AS/400 gives us lowest possible total cost of ownership," says King. "And now that BPCS is in place, we can build business intelligence applications on top of it." For example, Smollan can monitor a specific aspect of the supply chain, collect information on the AS/400, and download this data to a PC. There it can be interrogated with Cognos PowerPlay and the results distributed to the relevant account managers and published on customers` Internet servers. "This enables us to query the efficacy of any aspect of the retail supply chain, such as a product launch, distribution and point of purchase," adds King.
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