Originally focussing on the 6 local GCC markets of United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, this 50-year-old expert in consumer packaged goods is now globally established with truly leading products in chocolates, confectionery and ice creams, as well as a market leading range of personal care products in soaps and shampoos, liquid hand wash, sanitizers and deodorants. A growing international footprint however, demands a commitment to quality, and thanks to a modern forward-looking management this commitment now includes quality master data.
Managing some 95 operational sites including manufacturing plants, DCs, warehouses, fleet and vending assets does indeed present challenges for procure-to-pay and plant maintenance teams in terms of the data quality needed to support optimal business processes. But also, great opportunity exists at the same time in for example de-duplication and quality specification, enabling sharing of high-value plant, equipment and spares across sites. Despite having a single well-implemented SAP system, over time significant duplication as well as and non-standard material texts had proliferated, needing a user-friendly, technical material specification software utility like Refresh to fix, enrich and properly re-describe materials. This simultaneously enables the purchasing of generic parts or equivalent parts, freeing the company from a single source of supply which can be quite expensive in the highly specialized consumer packaged goods manufacturing and packaging world.
The project has just started and as such we are still working together to find the optimum way forward combining low effort and high return. So far, high value items from 8 large factories globally have been earmarked totalling around 10 000 material masters, with Refresh Desktop to provide the right noun-modifier class, characteristic specification template and characteristic values where possible. This will enable full professional long and short descriptions for each material, supporting lowest cost procurement, deduplication and reduced working capital, and ultimately driving high reliability maintenance processes.