One of the world’s biggest non-alcoholic beverage producers faced a nightmare scenario. Their UK tea manufacturing operation relied on an outmoded production planning system.
The system was obsolete. No longer supported. But the real crisis was worse.
Everyone who understood it had either retired or left the company. The institutional knowledge had walked out the door. That left the critical production system orphaned.
Tea production required complex weekly planning cycles. The system generated forecasts from BW and extracted from spreadsheets. The outputs went to more spreadsheets, manually adjusted for promotions and exceptional events.
Rounds of adjustments followed, made chaotic by the difficulty of maintaining data discipline among many contributors. Once finalized, the client converted forecasts into orders from distribution to manufacturing. Production plans followed.
The entire process was manual, error-prone, and retrospective. However, nobody in the company could improve it because no one understood how the underlying system worked.
Tea production wasn’t simple manufacturing. Raw material prices varied by season. The finished product was a blend that required continuous adjustment to achieve a consistent taste at an optimal cost.
Buyers needed rolling 18-month forecasts. Sales provided 12-month numbers. The mismatch created constant planning problems.
An unnecessary historical split between distribution and manufacturing sites required manual data transfer between systems. This had evolved over time and become an accepted norm. Nobody questioned it because nobody remembered why it existed.
The company was flying blind. They couldn’t enhance the system. They couldn’t fix problems. They couldn’t even maintain what they had.
The knowledge exodus meant increasing vulnerability with every passing day. When something broke, there was nobody to call. When business needs changed, there was nobody who could adapt the system.
The client chose Pivot to design and implement an SAP-based solution for agile, optimized production planning. They needed consultants who could understand their business, not just impose a paper-based exercise on skeptical users.
Pivot consultants immersed themselves within the client’s business and SAP teams on site. Despite tight schedules, they took time to understand business processes in detail.
They grasped the importance and complexity of forecast accuracy. Seasonal raw material price variations. Continuous blend adjustments. The critical importance of timely purchasing for company performance.
Pivot identified the unnecessary split between distribution and manufacturing systems. This had forced manual data transfers that added no value.
The new SAP solution combined both sites within one system. One version of truth became visible throughout the supply chain. Manual intervention reduced to an absolute necessary minimum.
The system transformed from week-by-week retrospective planning to real-time demand response. Using SAP APO functionality, planners evolved from data collection workers into proactive forecasting professionals.
They gained capability to challenge unrealistic sales optimism. They could run scenarios to expose supply vulnerabilities before they became problems. Their role was enhanced beyond measure.
The project delivered on time and under budget despite ambitious schedules. Standard SAP functionality handled most requirements. Pivot restricted development to tweaking for genuine special needs.
The client’s SAP Centre of Excellence gained a long list of enhancement ideas and the skills to implement them. For the first time, they could generate full product costings within SAP.
Pivot ensured proactive skill transfer and thorough user training. The client wasn’t left dependent on external support. Knowledge stayed within the organisation instead of walking out the door again.
Sometimes the biggest technology challenges aren’t technical. They’re about preserving and transferring institutional knowledge.
The orphaned system crisis could have been catastrophic. Pivot didn’t just replace obsolete technology. They rebuilt institutional knowledge and prevented future knowledge exodus.
