SAP and Deloitte address food processing challenges
food and beverage companies improve operational efficiency has been
put together by software company SAP and certain Deloitte Touche
Tohmatsu (DTT) member firms.
The venture is also designed to help food companies address certain regulatory compliance issues.
The new package is planned to combine functionality from mySAP ERP and industry-specific SAP Best Practices with implementation and services from food and beverage industry specialists of the DTT member firms. The anticipated benefits include accelerated implementations, attention to certain integration risks and easier adoption of new technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID).
The new selection of packaged software and services will initially focus on sub-segments of the consumer products industry for meat, dairy, beer, soft drink and bottled water. The offering will likely be made available at the end of 2004 and includes packaged services and software tailored for these sub-segments based on best practices.
The announcement of the joint venture was made at the Efficient Consumer Response Conference being held in Brussels, Belgium May 24 - 26.
"Midsize and larger enterprises now expect turnkey business solutions that have a high degree of vertical granularity built in, bundled together with all the expert industry deployment and business consulting required to ensure success," said Robert Anderson, research director, Gartner. "This enables them to ramp solutions more quickly and accurately to predict ROI and align their IT budget with actual business objectives.
SAP and the DTT member firms intend to work together to offer packaged software that can be implemented out-of-the-box combined with services. These largely pre-configured solutions are to be designed for specific industry sub-segments and tailored to individual clients' requirements, thus giving them the opportunity to save time and cost compared with generic solutions that require more extensive customisation and additional support.
The new solutions are intended to help these organizations meet their baseline enterprise planning needs as well as address specific challenges such as food safety risk management and assurance scheme compliance.
"The goal of the planned solution is to enable companies in the food and beverage industry to have the right tools, implemented in the right ways, to meet the incredibly complex challenges they face," said Ed Carey, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu global consumer products leader. "This latest announcement is another step in a successful, 15-year relationship with SAP serving the food and beverage industry, with virtually unparalleled software solutions, industry knowledge and implementation skills."
Food companies are seen to benefit from functionality such as quality management, batch control and RFID-enabled tracking and tracing. Beverage companies shall derive benefits from existing and planned features such as empties management, excise tax and direct store delivery tracking. The majority of companies in the food and beverage industries should benefit from software features designed to assist them in complying with legislation such as the US Bio-Terrorism Act 2002 and Article 18 of EU regulation 178, both effective January 2005.
"In light of the array of demanding issues currently facing food and beverage companies, our customers need the best professional advice and the right tools to maintain a truly adaptive enterprise," said Nils Herzberg, senior vice president of manufacturing industries, SAP. "With the combined experience of SAP and the DTT member firms in the food and beverage industries, we are in a unique position to respond to those needs."
