Cadbury Schweppes has suffered a delay to a key go-live date for
its £200m global IT reorganisation project.
The roll-out of the five-year IT and business process
reorganisation, Project Probe, was expected to be complete for the
group's Australian food and beverages division this month but has
been put back to October, a spokesperson said last week.
The food and drink manufacturer expects to get a £500m return on
investment from the project, which will eventually see its existing
54 datacentres cut to three. The spokesperson added that the
project would be completed on time.
The project is among several global IT reorganisations being
carried out by multinationals. Analysts said that delays are quite
common owing to the sheer size of the projects.
Simon Bragg, European research director with ARC Consulting, said,
"Three months' delay on a project of this complexity isn't too bad.
There are technical risks, which emerge at a late date when you are
testing interfaces - the scalability or response time might need
tweaking, or inconsistencies can emerge with different
implementation consultants working on different modules.
"Sometimes the data in legacy systems is so bad that it requires
considerable cleaning before transferring it to the new system.
Worse are people problems - for instance, the process designs might
not be totally appropriate, or training staff might take longer
than expected," he added.
Cadbury Schweppes decided to rationalise its IT systems because its
infrastructure was fragmented after a series of acquisitions and
failed attempts at harmonising sprawling systems.
Project Probe is Cadbury Schweppes' global reworking of its IT
systems. As well as the massive reduction in the number of
datacentres, it has said it expects to gain the £500m return on
investment as it consolidates 27 instances of SAP and harmonises
business processes globally.
In the five-year project set for completion in 2005, the company
will work with PricewaterhouseCoopers to establish three
datacentres housing 107 RS/6000 AIX servers and 90 Windows 2000
servers situated in Birmingham, Melbourne and Dallas which will
provide the basis for a common operating platform.
The company has 40,000 suppliers, 25,000 employees and more than
100 production sites around the world.