SAP S4
Distribution management system
Kellogg India intends to move to SAP S/4 HANA, and investments are accordingly in line for 2020. In an exclusive conversation with ETCIO, Asfar Khan, Director-IT, Kellogg South Asia, provides insights into how he plans to achieve this transformation.Riya Pahuja | ETCIO | December 26, 2019, 08:28 IST
Tracing back its history to 113 years, Kellogg has been successfully delivering healthy breakfast globally. Exploring a whole new market for its breakfast cereals, Kellogg entered India in 1994.
In a candid chat with ET CIO, Asfar Khan, Director Information Technology- Kellogg South Asia, reveals the company's technology strategy to address the Indian market with special focus on Kellogg India's planned move to SAP S/4 HANA from a traditional ERP system setup.
Kellogg India works on IT-as-a-Service strategy wherein they keenly partner with global and local IT partners to meet their technology needs.
As Asfar says, "We are not a technology company and we should not try to be one, our core business is food and we should allow partners whose core business is technology to bring back to us what is their core."
Kellogg India has been an island in the Kellogg Global IT setup with many of their deployed systems being dated and locally customized. The clear guide path is to be aligned with the Kellogg Global IT systems and deploy more fit-to-business systems with minimum customization.
As a part of this transformation journey, Kellogg India recently completed a migration of their Distribution Management System for smoother sales operations. The company has also successfully deployed its Sales Force Automation systems and is focussing on expanding this to the rural markets as the business expands their sales reach.
Kellogg India is now taking a jump from traditional ERP (Oracle EBS) to deployment of various SAP solution sets.
Currently only Kellogg South Asia works on Oracle in the globally deployed world of SAP solutions of Kellogg. The company has, however, strategized to start their journey to move to SAP S/4 HANA and the investments are in line for 2020.
"Kellogg does not run SAP S/4 HANA anywhere in the world. They are primarily on SAP ECC solution set globally. Russia is the first business unit that is today migrating to S4 HANA. So it is important for Kellogg India to wait for that template to stabilize and then move forward," explains Khan.
Kellogg India wants to be ready when it jumps into SAP S/4 "since it will have a different way of managing the back-end setups as compared to traditional ERP that is currently in use."
"Therefore, we are taking slow steps to understand it and mature ourselves from a process perspective and then migrate. The organisation should be pragmatically ready to take those steps from people and process per se and that is what we will try to do in the next 6 months," Khan says.
Khan believes before jumping into any migration and up-gradation, it is important to document what the 'as-is' processes are.
"The second question to ask is if there's a perfect-fit ERP for your business to meet the as-is processes. Once you know what your business needs are, match it with the solutions available. We have done this with SAP, Oracle, and other open source solutions as well, and then mapped our 'to-be processes' so that we can say how much of a perfect fit it is for us," Khan says.
"The other critical challenge lies in managing customization that has happened over the years in the old ERP solution.
"Fortunately for us, the newer functionality that is getting built into ERP already has those customization in the product only," he says.
"S/4 is not going to be our closure. It will grow in the times to come. So, the minimum amount of customization that we do, the easier it will be for us to maintain along with being cost effective and sustainable," Khan concludes.
Tags : Strategy & Management, SAP S4, SAP Hana, Salesforce, Oracle, Kellogg, IT strategy, Distribution management system