Coca-Cola is working with SAP to develop software to

improve efficiency in the drinks firm's supply chain.

Technology produced by...
Coca-Cola is working with SAP to develop software to improve efficiency in
the drinks firm's supply chain. Technology produced by the collaboration
could be used across the beverage industry, analysts have predicted.
The aim of the implementation is to give Coca-Cola more information at the store
and account level to improve its retail customer relationships.
Margaret Carton, Coca-Cola's chief information officer, said the new software should
cut paperwork, ensure cash settlements are made properly and reduce wasted
space in delivery lorries.
Coca-Cola already runs various ERP and supply chain management applications,
including SAP's R/3 material and production planning applications. However, these
systems do not connect store deliveries with back-end systems, Carton said.
Tony Hart, managing analyst at research firm Datamonitor, said the agreement
reflected the desire of manufacturers and retailers to improve supply chain visibility,
allowing for improved planning and reducing the potential for unwanted deliveries.
"The agreement between Coca-Cola and SAP will try to eliminate inefficiencies and
automate more of the extended processes from manufacturer to retailer," Hart said.

"There will be time and cost savings and the opportunity to drive revenues, for
example, replacing sold-out stock faster.
"Mobile integration in a project of this size will have its problems, but as Coca-Cola
is head-to-toe SAP, there is less potential for difficulties."
The data integration issues the project will tackle include providing functionality to
the mobile worker so that the data entered into the mobile device is either
automatically transferred or synchronised to back-end applications, said Hart.
The new application should help improve vending machine management, with
support for direct upload and download of sales information using a handheld
device. This could be improved further with the use of electronic tracking
technologies, such as radio frequency identification tagging, Hart said.

The New Face of Financial Reporting at Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

Consolidated

Enterprise finance isnt getting any easier; rather, its complexity increases daily. My staff is
being asked to figure out how to complete more and more tasks better, faster, and smarter, says
Jody Billiard, Vice President, Controller, and Chief Accounting Officer of Coca-Cola Bottling
Co. Consolidated (CCBCC). The result, then, is that this continued pressure motivates our
business to find ways to improve processes and capitalize on in-house resources.
The finance group at CCBCC comprises about 100 employees who access the companys
financial systems on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These individuals are tasked with
analyzing income statements, like monthly profit and loss (P&L) reports, to examine profit
ratios, costs, and selling prices and they are always looking for ways to improve reporting.
The financial reports the finance group creates are instrumental to the business. Executives who
are in charge of managing the budgets for their respective departments rely on these reports to
make important and timely decisions. And the finance users who create the reports want to
follow the most efficient processes possible.
Seeking a Financial Reporting Boost

From a finance perspective, we use Microsoft Excel tremendously, says Christy Ruth,
CCBCCs Director of Financial Systems and Business Integration, who is responsible for
maintaining the companys SAP ERP Financials software. Historically, when performing the
monthly close processes that involve our SAP modules for finance and controlling, people
downloaded data from the SAP system and then reformated it or rekeyed the information into
Microsoft Excel.
Advice from Jody Billiard,
VP, Controller, and Chief Accounting Officer, CCBCC
1. Establish some preconceived notions of what types of reports you want to
build.
2. Capitalize on the training you receive from your software provider.

3. Select two or three people who can become proficient with the software
immediately. Its helpful to have a few people who can teach others; and
this way, you become self-sufficient.

Out of CCBCCs 500 SAP financial systems users, approximately 100 of them are considered
power users of financial data. These users were tasked with highly manual processes around
exporting data, which introduced the risk of duplicate entries and hampered P&L analysis.

The companys financial reporting processes consisted of a mishmash of manual spreadsheet

exporting with data coming from SAP systems for monthly P&L statements, financial
management packages, and other decision-making documents. In addition to the managerial P&L
reports, the finance group had to develop other reports to help finance users compile,
communicate, and analyze its core management reports.
We were hand-churning a bunch of Microsoft Excel reports that executives at the company
were reviewing, says Billiard. That was frustrating.
To alleviate these challenges, the finance group began searching for a solution that would ease
financial reporting and be intuitive for executives and end users. We wanted a tool that we could
implement quickly, that business and finance users could learn rapidly, and that wouldnt take up
a lot of support and resources from our IT department, says Ruth.
The answer came in the form of a Microsoft Excel add-in for use with SAP software, called
Spreadsheet Server.

Embracing Users Spreadsheet Fanaticism

The Spreadsheet Server tool from Global Software, Inc. caught the finance groups eye because
of its familiar interface. Accountants are such Microsoft Excel fanatics, says Billiard. We
needed something that had a similar look and feel to it, and Spreadsheet Server fit the bill for us
on that.
The tool retrieves data directly from SAP applications and transfers it into Microsoft Excel. More
specifically, it sends out a formula that grabs real-time data from SAP ERP Financials. Because
of the tools intuitive interface, users could latch onto it and start using it right away, says Ruth.
We wouldnt have to do data exports anymore, and thats what was really appealing about the
software.
CCBCC has been a loyal customer of Global Software for many years and has a lot of trust in the
companys expertise. They have been a very good and flexible partner for us, says Billiard.
And based on the demos of Spreadsheet Server, we were pleased with the capabilities of the
product itself.
To the delight of the CCBCC team, the products implementation didnt require a project at all.
We received about a day and a half of training, and then we were up and running and ready to
go, says Ruth.
The tools 20 or so users are successfully using it daily. Were learning more each and every
day, Billiard says. And there is still a lot of opportunity for us from a user training and
utilization standpoint.
How Financial Users and End Consumers Are Benefiting

The financial users who previously struggled with the manual exporting process are now
benefiting from the new tool. These users can view costs across departments more easily and
provide more detailed forecasts for individual functions or for the entire company.
The SAP Evolution at CCBCC

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated has been an SAP customer since 2004. Prior to using
SAP software, the company relied on accounting systems that resided on a mainframe system.
Billiard describes that environment as providing nice, fast, and reliable processing, but with
nothing terribly sophisticated or real-time about it. Since its initial SAP implementation, the
company has upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0. And according to Billiard, the business hasnt even hit
the tip of the iceberg when it comes to updating and benefiting from its financial systems. We
continue to see more opportunities to leverage the full capabilities of SAP software because
many of our core operating systems still reside in that mainframe environment.

According to Billiard, Spreadsheet Server also has helped the finance group and analysts at
CCBCC with their financial data gathering and reviewing. Were already realizing gains from
getting information in different formats so we can analyze the data much better and more
quickly, rather than just spending all of our time compiling, he says.
While the finance users are seeing great value from Spreadsheet Server, the end consumers are
the ones reaping the greatest reward. The consumers of the reports, the executives, can get data
faster and more easily than they used to, says Billiard. When they make a request, depending
on the nature of the request, we can develop a report and put it in production in hours instead of
days.
He says that CCBCC will continue to improve the way it uses the tool. As a business, weve got
to be faster and better with what we do, and Spreadsheet Server is one of the tools that will help
get us there, he says.

Coca-Cola uses SAP to drive major business

transformation
By Enterpriseinnovation Root | 2010-02-15

Mergers present significant opportunities for a complete transformation of the entire combined
business organization. Case in point: Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company S.A. of Maroussi,
Greece. Coca-Cola Hellenic, formed in 2000 as a merger of two smaller bottling companies,
became one of the worlds largest bottlers and distributors of Coca-Cola products. The new
company decided to standardize on the SAP ERP application as its back-office software to
better coordinate with its partner and supplier, The Coca-Cola Company, which had standardized
on SAP software that same year. Since then, Coca-Cola Hellenic has been applying SAP
technology to every challenge it has encountered, most recently a companywide transformation
of its customer service processes.
This case study highlights the importance of proper planning, strategic thinking and a willingness
to embrace a radical idea to achieve transformational change across the entire enterprise. CocaCola Hellenic Bottling in Greece not only pulled off the merger of two smaller bottling
businesses into one big company, but did so with startling positive results.

Coca-Cola SAP
Published April 3, 2014 | By Nick Noell

Coca-Cola Supply Chain Management Success Story

A Modern Supply Chain for a Classic Beverage

When it comes to the worlds most powerful brands, Coca-Cola is still number one. The iconic
beverage maker, which has dominated the global soft drink market for more than a century,
continued its 12-year reign at the top in 2011, according to Interbrands latest global rankings.
For Coca-Cola, achievements like this are byproducts of a vision and an operating framework
that is built on excellence. At Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE), the exclusive Coca-Cola bottler for
its territories in Western Europe, the companys goal is to be the number 1 or strong number 2
choice in every category it competes in.
But on the road to long-term, sustainable growth, CCE faces similar challenges to many other
manufacturing and logistics businesses. A top priority is replacing dated systems with a
modernized platform across markets to create a cohesive view of metrics and streamlined
processes.
Bottling iconic brands in Europe
CCE is one of the worlds largest marketers, producers and distributors of Coca-Cola products.
CCE buys concentrate from The Coca-Cola Company and combines it with other ingredients to
create some of the most popular beverages in Belgium, Great Britain, France, Luxembourg, the
Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.
In 2010, CCE completed a significant transaction with The Coca-Cola Company, selling its
North American operations, while retaining its European territories and acquired new bottling
rights for Sweden and Norway.
CCEs executives recognized that establishing a uniform IT program across all of its business
units would be critical for expanding CCEs footprint in Europe.
It is very important for us to have a set of consistent standards and processes, so that when we
acquire and integrate new territories into our business we can easily put those practices in place
in a short time, says Kemal Cetin, vice president of European deployment at CCE.
Driving regional expansion with IT
As part of its Genesys program, CCE set out to deploy a new supply chain management solution
at all 17 of its European plants. The new system would replace and automate many of CCEs
supply chain processes and required new skill sets to ensure the required speed of deployment.
CCE needed a partner to help deliver this new SAP-enabled business transformation. This would
involve not only delivering a technology solution, but also training users on the new processes to
ensure the full benefits were realized.

CSC was selected because it has combined a strong front office business transformation and
change management consulting capability with a back office technology delivery capability for
CCE since 2008. Prior to Genesys, CSC had already been supporting CCEs applications with
SAP, including order processing, manufacturing, financial transactions, human resources,
procurement and other related processes.
We started Project Genesys not as an IT project, but as a business transformation project to
enable CCEs day-to-day business to work in a harmonized way, says Cetin. Since CSC knew
our processes, people and solutions, we thought that would carry over very well into the
deployment process, and especially from an acceleration perspective, because the learning curve
would be relatively short.
Beyond that, Cetin adds, CSC has very experienced and capable people from an
implementation perspective. And, we needed to make sure the cost-quality equation worked for
us. CSC met our criteria and satisfied us from that perspective as well.
Filling a gap between supply and demand
The Genesys program is an integrated SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that
will replace CCEs legacy systems in the processes of order to cash, requisition to payment,
and record to report.
Genesys will allow CCE to shorten cycle time in these processes and be more productive. It will
also help bring more visibility into the business and improve decision making.
We are a shelf-replenishment company, a supply chain company, a sales and customer services
company, says Esat Sezer, senior vice president and chief information officer of CCE. It is
very important for us to integrate our manufacturing plants all the way up to the replenishment of
shelves in the retail outlets. Through the information side of the equation, we are basically tying
those two ends of the business process together: the manufacturing side, which drives the supply
of our product, and the shelf-replenishment side, which drives the demand part of our product.
CSC is playing a major role in expediting the delivery of Genesys across CCEs operations,
allowing CCE to deploy Genesys at multiple-country locations at a much faster pace than if CCE
had forged ahead alone.
There are a lot of technology areas that require some capacity that we might not have or some
technology areas that we might not have the knowledge about, says Sezer. So whenever we
have those knowledge gaps, we turn to our strategic partner CSC to fill in. Whenever an
accelerated deployment need arises, we leverage CSC, and we can generate value much more
quickly.

Enter SAP
Going way back together

Unilever and SAPs history together stretches back over 10 years, with SAP software supporting
Unilevers end-to-end business operations. During this time, the two companies worked together
to consolidate almost 200 instances of ERP to 4 regional instances.

At the core of this journey was Unilevers desire to accelerate the business while simplifying and
improving the user experience.

Faced with massive and still growing data sets, Unilever became an early adopter of the SAP
HANA platform. During a Design Thinking workshop, Unilever recognized the potential for
even greater acceleration and simplification of their core processes. People across the
organization started to investigate scenarios where SAP HANA could drive real value to the
business in areas such supply chain, finance, and marketing.

Thinking differently with SAP HANA

The SAP Experience
Facing reality, focusing on opportunity

Unilever and SAP have strengthened their partnership further with a completely aligned set of
metrics, a common understanding of the challenges at hand, and a focus on future opportunities.
Unilever continues to rely on their core IT platform to drive innovation and continuous
improvement. They also developed a Unilever Centre of Expertise in Bangalore to help roll out
new programs seamlessly and offer comprehensive support to end users.

Unilever Goes Global with a Transformative SAP HANA Project

By Ken Murphy, Features Editor | insiderPROFILES

July 1, 2013
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Unilevers 10-year plan to double its business is ambitious to say the least, and the
company knows it needs to do more than simply put additional products on the
shelves. Learn how Unilever took the initial steps toward this goal and significantly
reduced the time the business spent on month-end financial close processes,
financial analysis, and product cost forecasting processes.

Company Snapshot

Unilever

Headquarters: London
Industry: Consumer goods
Employees: 175,000
Revenue: 51 billion
Company details:

Unilever formed in 1930 when Dutch margarine company Margarine Unie

merged with British soap maker Lever Brothers

Lever Brothers was founded in 1885 by William Hesketh Lever; the soapmaking company diversified into foods in the early 20th century, beginning
with fish, ice cream, and canned foods

Margarine Unie formed through mergers with other margarine companies in

the 1920s

Unilevers personal care products, including Dove, Clear, and Vaseline,

accounted for 4.4 billion of a total 12.2 billion in revenue for the first
quarter of 2013; food products such as Knorr, Lipton, and Hellmanns
amassed revenues of 3.4 billion

55% of Unilever sales are in emerging markets; Unilever products are sold
in 190 countries

14 Unilever brands account for 1 billion or more in yearly sales

With approximately $13 billion in sales each year, ice cream represents
Unilevers biggest product category; the company introduced its bestselling ice cream brand, Magnum, to the $10 billion US market in 2011

SAP solutions: SAP ERP, SAP Business Suite, SAP SCM, SAP HANA, SAP solutions for
EPM, SAP APO, SAP CO-PA Accelerator
When consumer goods giant Unilever announced plans to double its business by 2020, it had to
think on a global scale. There was no alternative for a company with 2 billion consumers using at
least one Unilever product each day, including some of the worlds most recognizable brands like
Dove, Axe/Lynx, Lux/Radox, Becel/Flora, Knorr, Lipton, Hellmanns, Heartbrand, and Ben &
Jerrys.

In projecting to reach 4 billion of the earths (by-then) 9 billion inhabitants each day to fulfill its
10-year plan, as well as double sales to 80 billion, Unilever will need to do more than simply
put additional products on the shelves. Finding a revenue stream by expanding into emerging
markets is a central component of the ambitious roadmap, which also includes halving its
environmental impact within the same timeframe.
Enabling Growth with Convergence

Unilevers business model prior to 2007, when mostly every business in nearly 200 countries of
operation acted as an autonomous subsidiary, would have made this ambitious growth plan
exceedingly difficult. Under this model, Unilever operated more than 250 ERP instances,
processing roughly 30,000 transactions per minute. One key step, then, toward a growth-oriented
business focus would entail consolidating its fragmented IT and ERP platform to be managed as
a single global entity.
Our worldwide business runs on ERP systems. Every transaction for each order we receive,
material we produce, item we ship, and invoice we issue runs through our backbone ERP
systems, says Marc Bchet, Unilevers Global ERP Vice President. Trying to run a global
business that was doubling its transaction volume with 250 systems would have been quite
challenging.
Instead of adding layers of IT infrastructure to prepare for rapid business growth, Unilevers
globalization strategy involved the exact opposite action. The business knew that convergence
was necessary to respond to worldwide market forces in a truly global supply chain. According
to Bchet, Unilever is nearing completion of a project to run its worldwide business on four
landscapes of SAP ERP, with the ultimate goal of managing these landscapes as one global
platform by 2015.
This project has already paid substantial dividends. In addition to a three-year revenue growth of
10 billion a quarter of the way toward its goal Gartner recently recognized Unilever as #4
on its Supply Chain Top 25 2013 listing, reflecting a combination of top supply chain leadership
and performance.1 Unilever was ranked #10 in 2012.2

Rapid Expansion, Rapid Analysis

To remain at the forefront of the supply chain maturity curve with a wide range of cutting-edge
practices, to borrow Gartners analysis, Unilever knows that with its new IT solutions, speed
will be a key component of its ability to drive informed business decisions especially with its
SAP ERP instances expected to process roughly 60,000 transactions each minute, should
Unilever reach its ambitious growth objective. To address this need, the company began
exploring SAP HANA software as a proof of concept as part of its strategic Value Engagement
partnership with SAP. By 2012, Unilever decided to implement SAP HANA as an analytic
appliance to accelerate some of its key SAP ERP applications, starting with SAP CO-PA
Accelerator.
It ties back to doubling our transaction volume, Bchet says. Our worldwide business is
totally dependent on growing to scale with SAP software. We are very interested in anything that
can help improve performance, scalability, and transactional reporting, and for us that included
being part of that SAP HANA journey in the early days.
Unilever accomplished two major objectives by implementing SAP CO-PA Accelerator, powered
by SAP HANA. The first was to further reduce its month-end financial close to within one day,
giving Unilever tangible evidence that SAP HANA could deliver on its promise of increased
speed. This achievement gave Unilever the confidence that, moving forward, SAP HANA could
help improve other business processes.
Our SAP HANA implementation helped tremendously with a business scenario where there was
an urgent need, Bchet explains. But, perhaps more importantly, we gained experience and
built a foundation for SAP HANA. And as an accelerator contained to a single (critical) business
process, it was a fairly secure, low-risk use case. If it didnt work out, we could fall back to a
traditional database.
In tandem with this accomplishment, business end users let Bchets team know that, at least
from their perspective, SAP HANA had now become business critical and that they should do
everything possible to avoid falling back to the traditional technology.
We had business users telling us they absolutely couldnt live without SAP HANA, so that was
a big testament to the value the technology was bringing, Bchet says.
He emphasizes that the SAP HANA initiative focuses on accelerating operational work and
improving decision making in near real time, with analytics embedded directly in the SAP
systems and working directly on transaction data. The initiative does not replace but rather
complements our important global Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) strategy for reporting and
analytics, where ERP data is extracted, transformed, and loaded as well as combined with data
external to our ERP systems, he says. For SAP HANA as well as for our EDW strategy, the

quality of the underlying ERP transaction data is critical to the quality of insights and decision
making. To strengthen the foundation and get the full business benefits of new real-time insights
from SAP HANA as well as from traditional EDW analytics, we are continuously working on
further simplifying and harmonizing our ERP transaction systems.

We had business users telling us they absolutely couldnt live

without SAP HANA.
Marc Bchet, Global ERP Vice President, Unilever

Another accomplishment was more big picture in scale. In implementing SAP CO-PA
Accelerator powered by SAP HANA across four SAP ERP instances in just 16 weeks, and
managing it as a single global platform, Unilever validated its new ERP innovation model. It
could, it was shown, achieve rapid global innovation through just four instances of an industrialgrade solution, delivering the scale, resilience, and reliability the company needed.
Yes, we want to innovate globally faster and more productively, and the key is that we want to
do it once not four or more times, Bchet says. By managing the ERP instances as one
global platform, we could do that. We took the approach of developing once and deploying
everywhere, which was an early example of how we can move very fast, at scale. Now, we are
running a critical business process for Unilevers 50 billion business worldwide on SAP
HANA.
Accelerating Month-End Closing with SAP CO-PA Accelerator Powered by SAP
HANA

Unilever now runs 4.5 billion records for general ledger line items and more than 400 million
records for controlling and profitability analysis in SAP HANA, and the production system has
been dramatically accelerated. Best-case achievements are as follows:

Material ledger went from 5-7 hours runtime to 1.7 hours (66% reduction)

Cost center assessment time decreased from 11 hours to 6.7 hours (39%)

Top-down distribution products went from more than 11 hours to 7.6 hours
(32%)

Top-down distribution customers went from 60 hours to about 35 hours

(40%)

Controlling and profitability analysis reporting is now 10 times faster with

an improved user experience

From Push to Pull

Having seen, then, what SAP HANA could deliver as an early ramp-up customer, Unilever was
open to exploring other SAP HANA use cases, such as optimizing the end-to-end planning
process to maximize in-store, on-shelf availability for new product launches or during
promotions. With several use cases in the proof-of-concept stage, Unilever did expand its SAP
HANA implementations to accelerate other applications within SAP ERP Financials, namely
SAP Cash Forecasting and product cost planning functionality.
With SAP HANA powering its cash forecasting analysis, Unilever could analyze roughly 150
million monthly records in about half the time. And product cost forecasts that had taken about
seven minutes were being completed in about 30 seconds, giving Unilever a better understanding
of the profitability of its products.
According to Thomas Benthien, Global Director for Finance in Unilevers ERP Center of
Excellence, the initial benefits of SAP HANA have led to a change in IT philosophy. As he
explains, not only is IT innovating faster, but SAP HANA also helped drive a change from a push
to a pull mentality; whereas IT once pushed solutions to certain functions, the ERP Center of
Excellence has demonstrated business opportunities, and savvy stakeholders from the functions
are now pulling SAP HANA solutions in order to support the business growth agenda. This
includes current proofs of concept on powering many components of SAP Business Suite and
SAP solutions for enterprise performance management (EPM) on SAP HANA, including SAP
Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM), SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (SAP APO),
SAP Trade Promotion Management, and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation.
According to Bchet, leveraging SAP HANA to drive speed and efficiency in Unilevers trade
promotion processes is of particular interest, as trade promotions drive a sizable percentage of
sales transactions. As part of Unilevers regular innovation workshops it holds with strategic
partner Accenture as well as with SAP, an idea was formed to utilize SAP HANA to optimize
how Unilever allocates stock, leading to more timely and efficient trade promotions.
Historically, Unilever assigned stock on a sequential basis to match orders coming in. This
process is sufficient when theres enough inventory on hand, but otherwise it can become
difficult to decide how best to allocate limited resources. A customer executing an important
promotion, for example, would find the same percentage of an order unfulfilled as a customer

without a promotion. Using SAP HANAs real-time analytic capabilities, Unilever could match
orders against inventory at any given time, instantly run profitability scenarios, and optimize the
allocation of inventory. This real-time information would allow the company to minimize any
impact to current promotions in the event of inventory shortages.
With SAP HANA, our system will have the performance to do that on the fly, something just
not possible previously, Bchet says.
Looking Ahead

This idea is just one example of how Unilever collaborated with its strategic partners to identify
what Bchet refers to as a funnel of projects related to SAPs in-memory technology. One of
those projects, currently in the early planning stages, is to move Unilevers entire SAP Business
Suite onto the SAP HANA platform.
Its a journey of innovation, and were working with SAP and Accenture on the next steps. We
know SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA is now in general release. But we are also
running some of the biggest SAP ERP systems in the industry, and we need to move to new
technologies in a risk-managed way at the right point in the maturity cycle, Bchet explains.
We had thought this would be two years out or so, but right now, were seeing things moving
much faster than we had anticipated, so we may very well move our SAP Business Suite onto
SAP HANA sooner than that.

Unilevers long-running relationship with SAP to extend

into the cloud
Unilever, the fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer, whose brands include Dove soaps,
Vaseline and Slim-Fast, has had a long-standing relationship with enterprise software provider
SAP. So long, in fact, that its CIO, Willem Eelman, can't give an exact date as to when the
relationship began.
Further reading

SAP Sapphire: Unilever strives for UI as good as Apple', says global

CIO

Salesforce strategy is 'easy and requires no real innovation', says

SAP's head of corporate strategy

SAP Sapphire: SAP to start offering Fiori apps for free

SAP Sapphire: SAP claims it will add jobs but side-steps questions
on layoffs

"I can't tell you when, because Unilever was a highly fragmented organisation with very
independent operating companies right through the 50s, 60s and 70s. It was only in the 80s and
90s that we started consolidating," he told the media at a roundtable discussion that took place at
SAP's Sapphire user conference in Orlando, Florida.
Hence, Unilever is probably one of SAP's first major clients.
The scale of a company such as Unilever, with half-a-billion invoice lines to its customers on an
annual basis, 400 million sales order lines and 100 million purchase order lines, means that it
needs extremely reliable business software and partners to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
"Internally, we use the metric of compulsive uptime'; we demand 99.8 or 99.9 per cent uptime
all of the time, and for that, SAP is critical because if the systems are down, factory lines stop
and we can't invoice, we can't ship, business comes to a standstill, that's why SAP is so
important," said Eelman.
He claimed that Unilever had undergone another consolidation programme over the past five to
10 years, and that its business is now divided into four main territories, or "landscapes":
Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.
Eelman, who has been global CIO of the company for more than four years and is set to be
replaced by Thomson Reuters CIO Jane Moran this month but remain at Unilever, said that the
company is focusing on three areas: cloud, mobility and digital.
He added that mobility wasn't just about the company's own employees but also about providing
mobility solutions to its own distributors.
"For example, in India we operate to 2,500 distributors who serve roughly four million shops on
a bi-weekly basis. Over there, we have 65,000 people with mobility solutions that we provide and these are not Unilever employees," he said.
The solutions incorporate functions such as stock taking and inventory control, and are also used
by distributors in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Ensuring SAP won't let you down
SAP is one of Unilever's "key partners" in the mobility space, said Eelman, who had said that
there was an "Achilles' heel" with SAP when he started his role as CIO.
"It was a fantastically engineered product but its user interface hadn't kept up with modern trends
and the demands that younger people were putting on the UI," he said.

He said that he was very vocal about this to SAP, urging the firm to embrace "design thinking",
and improve the UI of its core products.
"We wanted to expand usage and adoption of SAP within the company, but we felt at times that it
was an inhibitor of usage and adoption and this resulted in high costs for training and retraining
because we had employee churn.
"The argument [from SAP] was that users love those screens, and perhaps this was true of
someone who had worked five to 10 years with the same application and knew how and where to
find everything," Eelman said.
Unilever has since worked with SAP to improve its UI in design workshops, being one of the
first brands to trial SAP tools such as Fiori and UI5.
"We have significantly overhauled the UI together with SAP to make the product much more
appealing and make it easier for our users, particularly in R&D and customer management," said
Eelman.
And he is keen to ensure that Unilever has a similar impact to Apple, which also used SAP's
technology to underpin its App Store.
"Apple has fused the SAP product with a significantly improved UI, and if you can do that then
you're in the sweet spot of driving adoption in your business," he said.
"Apple has done a brilliant job and I hope we can get to that level as well. We strive to create
really appealing apps that people would like to use for three reasons: because they work, make
them more efficient and because they're easy to use," he added.
Unilever has been involved with SAP HANA since its inception seven years ago, and was the
first in its industry to test the in-memory database.
"When [SAP co-founder] Hasso [Plattner] started talking about it, he had enlisted support of a
few large SAP customers because he needed the data sets to prove that HANA could work, so we
made the data available to him, and saw how it worked in development. We've been really
lucky," Eelman said.
He suggested that Plattner's vision was about releasing virtually unlimited computing power
using memory, rather than disk, which would transform the way organisations carry out
processes.
"For example, in a sales and operations process where historically we would need an overnight
batch of windows just to extract data and re-tune data - this would eliminate that need," he said.

But SAP's strategy has not always aligned with Unilever's. Eelman suggested that three to four
years ago HANA focused more on business intelligence, and that Unilever had to keep
reminding SAP that the German company's original promise was that HANA would be a
transformational tool used to redesign core business processes.
An example that Eelman alluded to in terms of redefining work processes was the use of SAP
CO-PA Accelerator, which runs on SAP HANA. This helped the company to reduce its monthend financial close to within one day. As all of Unilever's financial data is replicated, it can run
its ERP and profitability analysis in near real-time, said Eelman.
"Because of that, as a company, we published our full financial results this year at the earliest
point in our history on 20 January, which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.
That was the transformation of processes, not just accelerating what we do, and doing things
faster," he said.
But Unilever hasn't yet put all four of its business landscapes onto the in-memory database.
"It's no longer a theoretical concept. We know that it works because we've done a proof of
concept where we've put one of our landscapes on a complete HANA instance already so we
know it scales," Eelman said.
The first landscape has been given the go-ahead in what is a 12 to 18 month project, because it
needed to be upgraded, with the others to follow.
"It is the Holy Grail to have our core landscapes in a single HANA logical database... the
opportunities that become available once I have the lowest level of granular data to run processes
very differently is massive as they will be speeded up. We've done it with finance, and now we
want to do it with logistics and supply chain processes," he said.
He said that this wasn't something that was available with SAP just yet, but that Unilever is
partnering with the software company to achieve this.
"If I had more real-time information and I can improve my demand plans accuracy by 10 per
cent, I can either reduce stock levels or avoid having 'out of stock' situations with our customers,
which will help with my on-shelf presence and boost my top line, or will reduce my working
capital... These are very tangible benefits that we think can be unlocked through HANA," he
said.
But while he acknowledged the "significant costs" associated with such a move, he said Unilever
was cautious because of any potential disruption that could be caused from a "fundamental
database upgrade and data migration effort".

Slimming down costs with the cloud

The company is now working on a hybrid cloud solution because it wants to maintain some
footprint on-premise.
"We will go public cloud where it makes sense, for HR we are already a big user of Amazon Web
Services, on core ERP we will be more careful and go hybrid," Eelman said.
"In my dream scenario, SAP solutions are managed by the experts and I'm kept up-to-date all of
the time, in an environment that is well-managed or secure - I don't need to own that.
"But if I go to my board, to the audit committee and say I don't know where my data is that runs
our business, and if it goes wrong we will be bankrupt, I don't think many audit committees or
boards will sign-off on that today - but it's different for some of the other applications," he added.
On running SAP HANA Cloud rather than on-premise, Eelman said that he would expect a 20 to
40 per cent reduction in total cost of ownership. But this was not the reason why they ought to go
ahead with moving to the cloud.
"The real business case wants to create a seamless supply chain, to eliminate wastage and drive
value in the form of top-line growth. I'm really careful not to sell it internally as a cost-reduction
opportunity because then I'm underselling the potential," he said.

Unilever in major SAP usage expansion

Unilever has extended an SAP enterprise resource planning rollout to North America, vital to its
core business processes including supply chain management in one of its largest business
regions.
The consumer goods giant, which makes brands including PG Tips tea, Persil washing powder
and Bertolli olive oil, told investors it had "successfully completed" the rollout in the run up to
Christmas. The move is vital, because the US represents a third of its 11 billion (9.6 billion)
global revenues.
News of the SAP rollout's progress came as the company posted a gradual one percent climb in
annual operating profits to 6.4 billion (5.3 billion).
Its Western European SAP rollout, where the project began, was completed in 2008. Unilever
said two years later that the system was significantly improving "operational execution" and
efficiency, as well as dramatically cutting complexity.

The rollout of standardised SAP ERP, with Accenture, is a key part of the One Unilever
programme, aimed at unifying business processes. Total savings from all continuous
improvement efforts, including IT, had hit 1.5 billion (1.2 billion) since 2008, Unilever said
last week.
Unilever is able to access real time information from its supply chain and procurement systems,
which are based around SAP ERP.
It has said the systems are central to the future of its business operations, enabling it to better
manage volatile prices and changing commodity supplies. It is able to design, manufacture,
market and distribute products to over 30 countries in under a year.
The supply chain effort is also crucial to a major drive to halve the environmental impact of
Unilever's operations within a decade. Over the same decade, Unilever is attempting to double
annual revenues to 80 billion.
Unilever is also building a global private cloud with Avanade, managed on the Microsoft System
Center 2012 platform, in an attempt to further standardise and automate processes.
It is in the midst of a business intelligence upgrade with Capgemini, focused around SAP
NetWeaver and Microsoft ProClarity analytics. Its other key outsourcers are BT for networks,
and Unisys for IT management.