Wanting to take their demand planning to a more sophisticated level, personal care accessories manufacturer QVS Global saw the opportunity to integrate their whole system infrastructure in a cloud-based delivery model. The company became one of the first in Australia to implement SAP Business ByDesign. Freya Purnell reports.
Background
QVS Global is a supplier of personal care accessories to major retailers in the grocery and department store channels, offering distinctive ranges of cosmetic, nail, bath and hair accessories. It is a small business based in Australia, with links to manufacturing operations in China.
QVS was predominantly using spreadsheets to run its internal systems, but as the business grew, this was becoming more difficult to manage – the spreadsheets became quite large and complex, and trying to share the information between multiple staff members was tricky. QVS Global director Michelle Knight says the company was originally looking at different options for a demand planning system, including custom development. “But talking to CN Group about ByDesign, we progressed along that track to look more for a fully integrated system for demand planning, inventory management, and financials.”
As a relatively small team, QVS wanted a system that would provide a platform to grow the business without increasing their headcount.
Alanna Woodrow, lead solution advisor for the CN Group, says, “They were looking for a solution that would offer shared transparency and efficiency across their business operations, in a simple and intuitive fashion.” It was also important that their new solution fit within their budget constraints, and was a cloud-based system. “We are a small business and we travel a lot and work remotely, so a key component was that we had secure access to information wherever we were working, whether that was here or overseas,” Knight says.
QVS director Greg Coulter says that the cloud framework also appealed because the company has no inhouse IT professionals.
“We simply don’t have the resources to manage an inhouse system that may be server-based,” Coulter says. Knight admits that as a smaller, very flexible business, they did think twice about choosing an SAP solution, as others had advised them that SAP’s systems might be too rigid and bureaucratic. However, they were convinced that Business ByDesign would suit their needs.
“We believe it offers more flexibility than a traditional SAP system because it is tailored to the small to medium business,” Knight says. “We were confident that it would meet, and probably over-deliver on, what we were looking for.”
Coulter adds, “The overriding positive for us with SAP is that it is such a dominant company in this field, and we knew that any difficulties would be overcome by the support network.”
Implementation
As it was one of the first Business ByDesign implementations in Australia, SAP and CN Group, the first Australian partner on the solution, worked jointly on the project.
CN Group had solution advisors working on the project, and Woodrow says the company ensures that project teams always include a representative who has been through the pre-sales process with the customer, to ensure that their requirements are properly addressed throughout the project.
Business ByDesign is designed as a solution that can be rapidly implemented, and has a structured methodology built into the system called the ‘Go-Live Experience’. “Each phase of the project is system-led, and there is a number of questions and activities you need to complete. So no time is lost going out and blueprinting; you are building the solution as you move along,” Woodrow says. The QVS implementation was completed in less than four months, with the system going live in June. While the project took slightly longer than the average global implementation timeframe for Business ByDesign of 10 weeks, QVS had to undertake a significant amount of data cleansing, adding extra time to the process.
Challenges
Knight says that they found the remote implementation process challenging at times, with project team members based in Sydney, Melbourne and Shanghai, and a significant time commitment required to keep the project on track.
“I underestimated the time and effort that would be required for the implementation. It has been, at some periods, for weeks and weeks on end, all-consuming,” Knight says, adding that in hindsight they may have chosen a different time of year to do the implementation, rather than leading into their busiest period.
It is one of the common issues for smaller businesses without a dedicated resource to focus on the project fulltime, it must be juggled with the ‘business as usual’ work. However, despite the challenges, Knight speaks highly of the quality of the project team.
“The calibre of the people working on the product is exceptional. Their knowledge is just great,” she says. As a new solution for both CN Group and QVS Global, there has been a considerable amount of learning along the way on both sides.
“The challenge for any business going through a change project like this is that you are moving from tools that you use every day to a new system,” Woodrow says. “For us, it was one of our first implementations of ByDesign, so we worked very closely with SAP.”
Business benefits
The Business ByDesign solution is expected to deliver considerable benefits to the business, beyond simply improving their supply and demand forecasting. The key benefit is improving the visibility of information across the business, through the integration of formerly separate systems.
“From the point where they do their supply and demand planning, through to order fulfilment and financials, are going to be completely integrated. So they will see their financial postings automatically without any double entry or extra custom integration effort,” Woodrow says. “The solution will also improve the accuracy of information within our business, largely because of the process we have gone through to implement it,” Knight says. “At the moment, we are all working on different inventory and financial systems, and inherent with that is quite a big risk. So by having a fully integrated, visible system, it will take risk out of the business.” Woodrow says having access to the “impressive” reporting and analytics in ByDesign will give QVS a new perspective.
“They have the ability now to look at all of their financials in real time. They can also see real-time visibility of business performance.”
Using a structured system like ByDesign is also expected to add new discipline to business processes. “Because it’s fully integrated, you have to complete transactions in a very timely fashion for the system to work, whereas in our current models, we can leave things and try to catch up later, which can often lead to incorrect information being retained within the business,” Coulter says.
Finally, ByDesign provides QVS with the platform it needs for future growth.
“That was something we considered at the time we chose the solution. Quite honestly, even with our grand plans, I can’t see a situation arising where we would necessarily outgrow ByDesign,” Knight says.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Winter 2012.
