Nisa Today'sis a
distribution and services consortium comprised of over 670
retailers and 330 wholesalers, operating some 5,000 stores. Working
mostly in grocery, the company aims to negotiate the cost of
products and provide an efficient supply chain for its members, by
strategically using their combined-turnover powerbase.
Understandably, linking so many independent businesses into one
concern is a complex task, and in 2004, after nearly 20 years of
organic IT growth, the company faced the difficult decision to
either upgrade existing systems with best of breed, and perhaps
face a never-ending integration project, or replace and consolidate
with an
ERP system.
The critical factor in the success of Nisa Today's' ERP project
was cleaning the data before migrating to the new database, says
Wayne Swallow, the company's IT director.
The difficulty, says Swallow, is that the company does not
follow a standard industry model, and off-the-shelf software always
requires considerable customisation. "We're not a high-street
retailer, we're not a wholesaler, we're not an airline or bank we
don't necessarily fit with 'this is what the ERP modules will do
for you'. We went into the project knowing full well we weren't
going to get a 100% fit on our requirements list" he says.
Swallow engaged with over 30 suppliers, not only ERP providers
but also specialist warehousing firms, and after shortlisting,
decided that ERP with some bolt-ons was the best option. "We looked
at our core mechanics and the things that we really needed to focus
on, which were products and suppliers and promotions, and that
fitted quite well into a merchandising system."
On the basis of previous strategic decisions to
outsource non-core activities and not
increase the size of the IT department, Nisa Today's appointed
Enabler Wipro to implement the ERP system based on
Oracle's retail solution.
"We had a lot of internally written systems - some in
Cobol. Legacy solutions were on the AS/400
and others were DOS based. We had Access databases,
SQL databases and various others, and they
were all replaced," says Swallow, remarking how the only
infrastructure elements that remained were the accounts system,
which was subsequently upgraded, and the existing warehouse
management solution. "They became the two major areas of
integration," he says.
The consolidation and migration of data from the legacy
ecosystem to the new ERP database was a major sub-project tackled
in three roll-outs: Freeze, Chilled and Ambient, reflecting an
increasing number of product records for each phase.
"We had a complete team of people, and all they did was
concentrate on the migration. They did almost 20 test migrations of
various elements before we actually did the live migrations over
various weekends," says Swallow.
Together with the test migrations, Swallow is confident that
careful record laundering saved time and money. He says: "The data
take-on process has absolutely got to be cleaned up to the nth
degree. If you don't do that, all you do is bring the problems of
your old systems into your new ones. I'm not saying we got it 100%
correct, but by doing lots of migrations prior to going live we
ironed out virtually every single problem that we had."
Order processing entailed the largest area of bespoke
development. Required to take feeds from a huge variety of retail
ordering systems, including 49 varieties of EFTPOS, EDI,
XML and assorted tele-sales operations, the
consultants, Enabler Wipro, developed the system as a bolt on to
the ERP system, accounting for all the channels.
To avoid repetitive re-work and maintenance Swallow elected to
use an XML integration bus for every interface without exception.
"We used Sun's SeeBeyond to give us standard import and exports. If
you're writing individual interfaces, every time you change one of
your systems you have to rewrite everything," he says.
With the first six phases and over 4,000 man-days of the project
complete, Nisa Today's is able to take advantage of the ERP system
to offer improved services.
"If we get a new customer with 30 odd locations, within two days
we can set those locations up, range them and have deliveries
made," explains Swallow. "Within a week of engaging in business we
can have all their services set up. We couldn't do that three years
ago: we had forms for every individual department and it would take
weeks."
While there is an admission that the ERP system has increased
the overall IT budget, Swallow says the goal was to be more
competitive in an increasingly difficult market. "Our understanding
of the market place, born from the likes of Sainsbury's and Tesco
and the Co-op buying up a lot of our member's stores, is that we
needed to compete more, and we couldn't compete using our legacy
systems because we weren't able to offer the members what they
wanted which was a lot more online services and smoother operations
and a lot more information. To do that was one of the major
drivers."