Industry: Wine and Spirits
Employees: 3,900 worldwide
Solution: appsFreedomTM platform
The Challenge
As one of top 10 producers of spirits and fine wines in the world, and largest American-owned company in the industry, the company sells its nearly 50 industry leading brands through offices and distributor partners in more than 135 countries around the world.
The company relies on SAP to help manage the business and its vast network of distributors, but needed a far better way to distribute and track important HR policy changes. The policy changes need to be socialized, read and accepted by every employee, and the acceptance needs to be carefully tracked for legal purposes.
The company also has a Depletion Management system that was difficult to access, complicated to use and not very efficient at updating SAP with realtime inventory data across facilities. Management was looking for ways to improve system usability, track activity and speed the flow of business with faster system updates for every division.
The Solution
To harness the power of SAP while aiming to streamline business processes, the appsFreedom team designed and deployed a HR specific application, which is seamlessly integrated into the company’s on-premise SAP system.
After implementation which took a matter of weeks all HR policy changes were made easily accessible online, helping speed distribution and more accurately and automatically track employee acceptance notices in SAP.
The team also designed an improved the end user experience for the company’s Depletion Management system. Now the system is easy to access and the depletion quantities are quickly loaded into SAP by system users. The process is more efficient, and the amount of manual data entry required is dramatically reduced. Now the resulting system delivers immediate visibility into real-time, accurate inventory status around the globe.
Deployed in just weeks, the application uses the appsFreedom architecture and its desktop technology to speed inventory data loads into SAP from around the world, and to bring new efficiencies in global HR policy management.
The Business Benefits
Improved Business Performance
The new automated HR solution improved the depletion management user experience, speeded HR policy acceptance for employees and simplified HR policy management for the department. The real-time policy acceptance capture and tracking in SAP enabled process and operational performance improvements by cutting out paper and email-based systems.
Simplified User Experience
Exposing the Depletion Management system via the application’s desktop technology allowed for better visibility and a much easier user experience with simple interfaces and anywhere, anytime access. Better still, the system can now easily be used by international employees and distributors with minimal training for faster data loads into SAP.
Fast, Measurable ROI
Designed and deployed in just weeks, the application is fully integrated with the company’s on-premise SAP system for real-time, bi-directional access. Such a quick deployment created a fast ROI and helps ensure low maintenance costs now and in the months and years to come.