intelligent spend Archives - 51��Africa News Center

The Innovative Tech Powering the World’s Largest Coca-Cola Bottler

Tricia Manning-Smith — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 08:55:38 +0000

When I pop open a Coke, I’m consumed with the sound of the fizz and the flavor swirling in my mouth. Admittedly, I don’t think about how the Coke got into my bottle.

That’s Jorge Torres Perez’s job. He’s the strategic procurement director at the Coca-Cola FEMSA, based in Mexico City. Coca-Cola FEMSA sells Coca-Cola products across Latin America, with over 2,000,000 points of sale.

“I’m truly happy and I really smile when I see somebody drinking one of our products. To be very honest, it’s a huge responsibility,” says Torres Perez. “Literally thousands of people engage in dozens of processes to deliver your favorite beverage.”

Opportunity Creates Challenges

After 16 years with Coca-Cola FEMSA, Torres Perez moved into a strategic procurement role about seven years ago. He noticed Coca-Cola FEMSA invested most of its money in direct materials like bottles, labels, caps, and ingredients. He realized an opportunity. “Indirect spend on things like trucks and transportation, industrial tools, and parts was done locally by many, many people.” Torres Perez explains that the process was fragmented and segmented between many suppliers, which did not result in the best prices. “So, I studied how to centralize all those indirect negotiations in a more intelligent way, to really take advantage of the scale that we have as a business,” he says.

Torres Perez embarked on a challenging journey to integrate Coca-Cola FEMSA processes; it was a course of action that required leadership, patience, learning, and difficult course correction.

“We needed to change the role of our teams and restructure the procurement employees. But this cannot be done without a technological tool. It was very difficult to convince our management to get the indirect spend all together and change the way we worked in the past. It took us more than a year to start. At first, we chose a competitor of SAP.” Torres Perez recalls that the technology was fraught with problems. “The integration of that competitor’s solution was not there.”

A Lot at Stake

Torres Perez found himself facing both personal and professional dilemmas.

“I’d sold Coca-Cola FEMSA leaders on the idea of managing negotiations centrally, and they bought the idea. But when [the competitor’s product] didn’t work, it was really… I mean, my own reputation was at stake because I told them, ‘We can do this.’ But I was not able to deliver,” says Torres Perez. “I mean, it was a very difficult situation, because I had to go back to our management and ask them to switch gears again. This time to implement 51��Ariba instead of the other solution.”

Coca-Cola FEMSA’s leadership ultimately trusted Torres Perez and suggested that he implement 51��Ariba in a limited capacity, in Colombia only. And this time? Success.

“We implemented 51��Ariba on time and on cost, but the most important part: It worked and it worked fantastically. It was a very smooth transition and, once it was working, everybody was amazed.” Torres Perez soon got permission for a full rollout of 51��Ariba to all countries where Coca-Cola FEMSA operates. “This is a huge step forward.”

Advice?

Torres shares his technology story with the hope of inspiring his peers. “Let me tell you one thing: No matter how challenging an enterprise can be, if you have the correct partner, you’re always flying with a tailwind. That’s the most important lesson that I got from this process. And, once we worked with 51��Ariba, things got better and we were able to implement the solution easily.”

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Financially Driven Leaders Transform Procurement with 51��Ariba and 51��S/4HANA

Susan Galer — Thu, 07 May 2020 07:16:53 +0000

There has never been greater urgency for financial rigor, and many companies are finding it in technologies that provide company-wide visibility into procurement spend.

Several market leaders recently gathered online to share their procurement transformation experiences for an exclusive roundtable during the event. Hosted by Jo Peterson, vice president of Cloud and Security Services at Clarify360, a candid conversation covered not just the wins, but also major challenges.

Teams Dedicated to Collaboration

Like many global organizations that have grown by acquisitions, Stanley Black & Decker needed to simplify its complex technology landscape. The driver behind moving forward with 51��S/4HANA Cloud was the decision to go with the 51��Central Finance solution.

“Creating a new instance of allowed us to provide global and consistent financial information,” said Nicole Flikier, digital tools and analytics global lead at Stanley Black & Decker. “It allowed end-users to have a better experience and single source of truth, while supporting our long-term program to have one instance of SAP.”

Flikier was the first to admit that the transformation did not happen magically. Regular communication about the financial benefits united people on multiple project teams around what became a successful go live.

“With numerous ERP systems and all that data, making sure it was harmonized was a challenge. It takes an army to do that cleansing,” she said. “We needed to communicate to the team the value of a universal global ledger… Everybody knew the benefits tied to that, especially being a very financially driven company.”

Flikier characterized her company’s transformation as a tremendous undertaking with aggressive timelines for every project to go live simultaneously. She credited the team’s success to having a shared project methodology and meeting localized country requirements.

Faster Turnarounds Boost User Satisfaction

According to Jinesh Parakulangara, senior manager at HPE Global IT, replacing his company’s organically grown patchwork of legacy procurement systems with a single enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform – 51��Ariba running on 51��S/4HANA Cloud – has saved time and increased productivity for both procurement and payables.

“We now have a more controlled, centralized procurement function…with a road map to consolidate that onto a single platform,” he said. “Our business users are very happy. They just have to go into one system for global procurement operations and invoice verification, tax issues, and anything related to procure to pay.”

Amazing Integration Simplifies and Streamlines

HPE went live with the new cloud-based platform in 57 countries at once, backed by extensive training for employees and suppliers as well as built-in communication and collaboration. Besides touchless invoicing, the biggest win was the simplification around master data management delivered by 51��S/4HANA.

“With a cloud solution, we’re getting more features introduced to us, which we didn’t have in the past when we were on premise,” Parakulangara explained. “From a procurement standpoint, it’s really about simplification of our ordering processes. And on the finance side, with 51��S/4HANA, we’ve tightened the entire process. We truly have a single platform that takes care of our payable needs in a compliant manner. The way these systems integrate with each other is truly amazing.”

Data Harmonization Well Worth It

Similar to Flikier’s experience at Stanley Black & Decker, consolidating data was a worthy challenge given the results at HPE.

“Scrubbing the data was a challenge, but it revealed process gaps and it’s why everything is now streamlined,” Parakulangara said. “One of the reasons why we were able to get processes touchless is because we have brought…everything together from procurement to invoicing to payments all into the same platform.”

He added that using 51��best practices for core processes sped up the entire project.

Intelligence Supports Financial Discipline

Understanding the full picture of spend management is not just essential for operational continuity today; it is a business imperative to keep people productive. There is no doubt that a cloud-based system that brings together real-time information company-wide is instrumental in providing the financial discipline every intelligent enterprise needs.

Follow me: @smgaler

This article first appeared on the 51��News Center.

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Virtual 51��Ariba Live 2020: Intelligent Spend Is Bold Charge Forward

Susan Galer — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 10:29:10 +0000

While was not the originally planned in-person extravaganza this year, the virtual event — held Wednesday, March 18, and available on demand — gave procurement and supply chain professionals a bold vision for the future of intelligent spend and a practical path forward.

In a series of compelling video conversations, recognized industry experts, customers, and 51��executives shared especially timely and no-nonsense insights into the business value of procurement agility, reliability, and transparency. The agenda featured thought-provoking geopolitical trend talks, lessons learned from customers, solution strategy updates, and product demonstrations. This is the first in a series summarizing the .

New Procurement Experience: Agile, Reliable, Transparent

First up was Chris Haydon, president of 51��Procurement Solutions, who assured listeners that “together, we will get through all these challenging times.” Acknowledging COVID-19, he said that its increasing impact mirrored our growing realization of how connected and dependent we are on each other.

“The pace of the world is demanding changes, and 51��is uniquely positioned to help you manage those changes with intelligent spend management,” Haydon said. “Intelligent spend management is the reinvention of the procurement experience. It’s a thoughtful and deliberate realization that we need to move beyond only focusing on creating simple screens and user interfaces, and instead empower procurement to succeed amid today’s known disruptions and the unknown disruptions of tomorrow.”

As an example of SAP’s procurement commitment, he mentioned the company’s decision to open access to , allowing buyers worldwide to post their immediate sourcing needs to which any of the 4 million suppliers on can respond with no fees through June 30, 2020.

“51��is deeply committed to help you manage the complexities and mitigate the risks that disruption and accelerated change is inevitably bringing,” he said. “We’re hard at work with customers to help them understand how to use Ariba Network to identify supplies at risk, review supply chain data, and rapidly develop contingency plans.”

Unlock Insights with Community of Intelligence

Haydon said that it was time for procurement to become the epicenter of ideas and collaboration, owning the intersection of innovation and commerce between organizations. He called this “a profound and forward-looking change” in how people look at procurement, using the technology for tasks that can and should be automated so that businesses can apply human expertise where it is needed for greatest impact.

“The only way to make this possible is to get the process out of the way and get more insights into the hands of you, your training partners, and every part of your business. That’s the ultimate goal of intelligent spend management… reimagining processes to let intelligence do more work, so we can do more work better,” Haydon said. “We want to embed sustainability and risk context into every single supply chain event and reshape how we connect with trading partners by driving collaboration deeper into our supply chains and truly unlocking the power of community intelligence.”

Committed to Customer-First Experience

Having walked in the customer’s shoes, Haydon said that he understood their challenges, and with its co-CEOS at the helm, 51��was more focused than ever at “ensuring the customer experience is the true measurement of our success.”

“Ariba Network is the most powerful and effective network of its kind,” he said. “Sensing the opportunity to combine, streamline, and make your businesses run even more effectively and efficiently, we’ve pulled together 51��Ariba, 51��Fieldglass, and 51��S/4HANA operational procurement under a single organization with one clear vision… for intelligent spend management.”

Haydon closed with the promise to continue collaborating with customers as early adopters and partners.

“Your voices, insights, and ideas are key in helping us reshape procurement. If we can combine the depth of knowledge in our collective minds and the depth of feeling in our hearts, and our understanding of this new world of rapid disruption and accelerated changes, there’s nowhere we can’t go together. We believe in a future where procurement sits at the heart of the business, and together we can make this future possible.”

HPE: Path to Transformation

For a great example of intelligent spend management in action, I pivoted to Lucille Trickett, senior director of Global Solutions for the Office of Legal Affairs and Administration at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). In her video, she shared how HPE is using a suite of intelligent solutions from 51��to holistically view and manage multiple categories of spend from indirect, travel and expense, contingent labor, and service providers.

As a long-time 51��Ariba customer and partner, Trickett said that HPE’s transformation to the cloud was originally slated for two phases, starting with source-to-contract and followed by procure-to-pay processes. The company then decided to bring in . The second phase coincided with an overall next-generation IT transformation at HPE that would also consolidate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on . One of the objectives was to dramatically simplify and consolidate the customer, vendor, and partner master data structure.

“We now have a holistic view of our relationship with an entity, regardless of whether they’re a customer, partner, supplier, or all of the above. We took the time and effort to clean up our vendor master database and the new one was optimized by 39 percent,” said Trickett. “Given the size and scale of the [procure-to-pay] project, it was absolutely imperative that the business unit and global functions within the HPE company be ready for these changes.”

Trickett called the transformation journey an incredible experience for everyone involved: “Not only did we deliver everything we had committed to deliver in a changing environment, but we also found opportunities to drive additional innovation as we delved deep to solve issues along the way. We also strengthened our partnerships and collaboration, not just internally within HPE, but more importantly with our 51��family. I’m looking forward to working with the 51��team to design and innovate in the procurement arena for the future.”

Holistic Procurement View

During his introduction to Trickett’s talk, Haydon emphasized the importance of having a holistic view of procurement, because “it can help identify opportunities for economies of scale, enable better spend decisions, and drive better business outcomes.”

His thoughts were particularly relevant given fast-changing events in the world today: “When we at 51��tout our innovations and our never-ending commitment to make the procurement process as efficient and effective as possible, we do so to help protect the continuity of your business, employee livelihoods, and economies. It’s a bold charge forward, but the times call for boldness.”

To echo Haydon’s closing: Take care, stay healthy, and enjoy the 51��Ariba Live virtual experience.