Private-Label Food & Beverage

Business Challenge

A series of strategic acquisitions fueled rapid growth for the CPG manufacturer. In just a few years, the company extended its product portfolio from two to eleven product categories and more than quadrupled its net sales.

Despite the opportunity this growth presented, the acquisitions left product data being managed in disparate systems. The trickle-down impact was a disconnect in product development processes and inhibited integration & collaboration between business units and outside vendors.

The key challenges for product development included:

• Manual handoffs and tools used to manage over 16,000 finished good materials
• Workflow inefficiencies
• Manual keying of data into different systems, which slowed process time and increased risk of inaccurate or redundant data
• Inability to copy, scale, or synchronize a recipe
• Gaps in review and reporting processes

The Solution

As part of a strategic initiative to replace legacy systems and prepare for future growth, the company developed a business case for PLM with goals to create a single version of the truth for all product data, reduce compliance risk, and accelerate new product development.

SAP services partner Linx-AS was engaged to help realize those goals, bringing to the effort best-practice processes and components for implementing SAP Recipe Development and supporting applications which included:

• Data load tools to accelerate the complex data migration effort of tens of thousands of data fields and nearly 1,000 packaging and label documents.
• Labeling enhancements to greatly improve user experience
• Preconfigured workflow framework to transform multiple business processes that were previously performed in as many as thirteen legacy applications including:
  • Ingredient and packaging specifications management
  • Recipe management—formula and finished goods
  • Label/nutritional data management
  • Handover to manufacturing (material master, quality inspection plans, BOM and master recipe)