SEEKING THE SINGLE TRUTH

Every decision is taking longer than it should.

With 12 legacy ERP systems of business management software, data is generated and recorded differently all across Scandinavian Tobacco Group. It’s a result of how the company has grown. Now is the logical moment to unite these systems to simplify processes and improve the quality of data used for business decisions.

“For many years Scandinavian Tobacco Group has been under investing in IT, and now we have to catch up,” says Kenneth Messerschmidt, Chief Information Officer. “We need to invest to make our IT landscape modern, to simplify it and to really be able to support global processes, standardise and use best practices.”

Scandinavian Tobacco Group has carried out five acquisitions since 2016. It has inherited these companies’ IT systems, leaving a fragmented landscape where different parts of the company operate on different systems.

One global way of working

ONEProcess is the largest IT investment in the history of Scandinavian Tobacco Group. It is a significant business transformation and a new global ERP platform, provided by SAP, will be a key enabler for the execution of the Rolling Towards 2025 strategy. The programme will unite the current 12 ERP systems and will harmonise and simplify core business processes, improve quality of global master data and create a robust compliance and control environment.

SAP is the best fit with regards to functionality and best-practice processes, has a proven footprint and provides the strongest implementation partners.

Once implemented, this will simplify and standardise critical business processes and data, particularly in commercial, production, supply chain and finance departments – essentially reducing time spent on determining quality of data and providing a better and faster basis for taking informed business decisions, supporting growth, simplification and integration of future acquisitions.

“It has been a natural evolution that as Scandinavian Tobacco Group has expanded, we have ended up with multiple IT systems that harmonised across our company” says Rasmus Vienberg, Head of Information Management.

“It’s always daunting for a business to look at this journey, but everyone knows that the result – creating one global way of doing core aspects of your work – is a huge benefit and will leave us with huge benefits in our hands for better decision making. A pre-requisite for being a success is that we focus on the business aspect and improving the processes and data that people depend on.”

Real time data

An ERP application is the IT backbone in supporting an organisation’s processes, and any change to such application will impact the entire organisation. Work on ONEProcess has been underway since March 2020 to ensure business preparation. Work will continue through 2022 in preparation for roll-out, in waves across the organisation, from Spring 2023 with full implementation expected in 2025.

As a cross-functional and cross-divisional project, ONEProcess will involve employees and resources from almost all areas of the organisation. Adopting the newest technologies in the market and best-in-class standards will create opportunities for employees to learn new skills and increase their competencies.

“Today, we sometimes spend more time discussing what is the right dataset rather than how to act on the data – essentially, we’re debating what is the truth, because we have information coming from so many different systems,” says Messerschmidt. “In future with ONEProcess, we’ll be able to make faster and better decisions based on real time data, across markets and products, and this will also contribute greatly to our bold M&A agenda.”