Dairy Crest cuts SAP out of its food chain

Dairy Crest this week completed a year-long integration project following its acquisition of Unigate's dairy business last year.

The milk and dairy food producer has replaced Unigate's SAP installation with a combination of Geac's System 21 and Invensys' Prism enterprise resource planning applications.

Merging IT operations is a significant part of the £25m savings from the rationalisation of the two companies, says Dairy Crest business systems director David Batts.

The decision to ditch SAP in favour of the combined software used at Dairy Crest was a pragmatic one, he adds.

"SAP was at different stages of its implementation at Unigate, and some functions had not yet been installed. But Dairy Crest had fully implemented System 21 and Prism, and we didn't want to create complex interfaces to SAP," said Batts.

Three of Unigate's 12 factories needed urgent attention when the takeover was completed in July last year, so System 21 was quickly introduced in those sites for order processing and accounting.

When Dairy Crest centralised its order processing and call centres, the customer support team chose System 21 over SAP because of its existing electronic data interchange links to major supermarkets.

Batts then decided to replace SAP in all the remaining Unigate sites, except for four factories which will close during the next nine months.

Following the Unigate deal, Dairy Crest doubled in size, and Batts says merging IT operations should be treated like any major integration exercise.

"You have to make decisions as early as you can, stick to them and drive them through, even if some are proved wrong. The worst thing you can do is delay or change decisions," he said.

Another after-effect of such a major integration project is a backlog of new business requirements.

"You can't focus on new things during such a major project," Batts said.

"We are about to embark on an internal exercise to look at the enormous backlog of things the business wants to do."