Maximizing business growth, profitability, and future IT transformation and digital evolution

The company is one of the world’s largest independent beverage bottlers and operates in 13 European countries – producing and distributing over 50 non-alcoholic drink brands to more than one million customer outlets and 300 million consumers. The organization was seeking to bolster its operations through business growth, cost reduction, and vendor consolidation initiatives.

Firstly, in order to maximize business growth and profitability, the company was looking to optimize resource utilization and logistics capabilities. Secondly, the organization wanted to reduce costs overall with improved synergies across legacy IT landscapes while integrating processes, operations, and tools to slash IT operations costs and foster a readiness for future IT transformation and digital evolution. Thirdly, the organization was focused on vendor consolidation by working with a single, end-to-end applications transformation partner that could provide ADM support for all SAP applications at a low cost. To accomplish these goals, the company reached out to Capgemini.

A comprehensive transformation program applying ADMnext for SAP Solutions

The company and Capgemini utilized everything ADMnext for SAP Solutions has to offer through an integrated, end-to-end solution, which consolidates multiple suppliers into one holistic service that adheres to standard processes and delivers synergies across all geographies. As a whole, the project team provided ADM and support services that encompassed the following modules: multiple SAP HANA solutions and Central Finance SAP, Salesforce, Ariba, SuccessFactors, iOS, Python, Tableau, Kromos, DELL Boomi, SailPoint, Symantec, and Active Directory.

24/7 ADM support was delivered using Capgemini’s Rightshore Model with 540 consultants who were handling more than 6,000 monthly tickets and crafting a host of transformational projects across 47 plants in 13 countries. This model covered a full program of incident management and support, testing solutions, automation, and business value management.

Incident management and support included effective problem management and automation, which enabled the company to achieve a 9% year-on-year reduction in incident inflow, along with a 37% reduction in major incident inflows thanks to the Service Desk. With testing solutions, the Capgemini team applied tailor-made regression testing solutions via their Tricentis Tosca capabilities. In addition, the partners utilized Tricentis Neo Load capabilities to successfully execute performance and load testing.

The Automation and Innovation Club

Next, through the creation of the Automation and Innovation Club, the project team combined business value managers, automation CoEs, Capgemini’s Design Office innovation hub, and the Sector Hub to drive new initiatives for transformation and core and adjacent business functions. The team built multiple proof of concepts (PoCs), along with an automation roadmap structured around use cases specific to the bottling company. The team also proposed automated testing for all enhancements to ensure application stability in preparing for its future S/4HANA program, as part of which the Capgemini team focused on strategic use cases that utilized self-heal BOTS and built-in sales orders, business analytics, and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) dashboards to analyze and fix errors. Capgemini’s Solution Finder applied cognitive tools, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, all of which combined to deliver €650,000 in cost savings.

These joint automation efforts resulted in a 50% reduction in high-priority incidents, more than 1,000 ready-to-use test scripts (both automated and manual), an 85% reduction in monthly maintenance effort hours for legacy systems, 10% fewer sales representative issues within Salesforce applications, and €1.2M in cost savings to date. The team also delivered 80% effort savings on reconciliation activities, 25% cost savings on standard request automation, a 10% improvement in turn-around time for incidents, 90% effort reduction for the report automation of security checks, and the streamlining of more than 200 sales and operations planning processes for recurring activities.

Business value management and Capgemini’s Business Command Center

Another critical part of this engagement was the organization of teams by product value streams – each with their own business value manager. Utilizing Capgemini’s Business Command Center, business value managers deployed dashboards to improve daily operations and planning, which saved two to three hours in manual effort daily and helped the company identify potential opportunities for add-on sales.

Sales dashboards enhanced business efficiency in managing sales operations and business KPIs around order-to-billing cycle times. They also helped avoid over €40,000 per year in revenue loss from order refusal and mitigated potential increases in distribution and labor costs. The EDI dashboard enabled direct end-user control for the management of issues, improved on-time order fulfillment for over 400 orders per month, and increased the solution’s reusability across other client business units. The team also created a stock reconciliation web portal, which included dashboards for heightened visibility and stock accuracy between third-party logistics provider sites and the company’s systems. This tool helped boost inventory accuracy KPI fulfillment to 99.99% and reduced manual activities by over 3,000 hours annually.

The automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) cockpit brought end-to-end, real-time process tracking, identified point of failures for high-priority issues, reduced site outages, and improved system availability. While the SAP Network Dashboard highlighted aging open documents across five categories at locations in the UK, helped foster a cleaner system to improve available to promise (ATP) results, improved order fulfillment, and reduced the amount of manual effort required by more than 1,500 hours. Additionally, the Salesforce Health Portal markedly improved business efficiency with the proactive resolution of identified issues while simultaneously reducing the turnaround time for the allocation of licenses to new users.

Overall, the Capgemini team’s strategic efforts brought the following benefits:

• €1.2M in total cost savings to date
• 85% reduction in legacy system monthly maintenance effort hours
• Raised inventory accuracy KPI fulfillment to 99.99%
• Reduced manual activities by over 3,000 hours annually
• Substantial reductions in IT Opex budget thanks to the elimination of local support vendors and shifting from a high-onsite presence to a Rightshore model
• Faster business issue resolution and solution creation stemming from Regular Business Partner (BP) connects with business value managers
• 10% year-on-year savings through process optimization and automation
• Reduced testing effort requirements for upcoming projects thanks to the automation testing suite
• Slashed ADM operation costs by utilizing IT experts on strategic projects.

Refreshing a successful partnership for the future with ADMnext for SAP Solutions

The partners will continue on this evolutive journey together with Capgemini expanding on its role as the client’s largest service integrator, consulting partner, and end-to-end ADM services provider. In growing this relationship, the client is looking forward to Capgemini taking on additional responsibility for other regions – and also supporting them extensively in their future transformation program.

Learn more about Capgemini’s ADMnext here.