Overview:
Dannon is a leader in the overall world food industry and widely recognized for the strength of its brands in the businesses of fresh dairy products and beverages as well as its propensity for leading the way in setting trends in consumer tastes. Their dominant worldwide position owes as much to a focused business structure as it does to its product portfolio -- a structure that depends both on people and a tightly integrated information technology infrastructure for the management of information flow between the parent company and the various business units, plants and distribution centers that exist in countries around the world.

The Challenge:
The backbone of this company's leading presence and position has always been a proven ability to adjust quickly and successfully to changes in its business environments and its dependent supply chain.

In 2001, the parent company launched an SAP implementation to enhance this level of responsiveness with a strategic goal of enhancing the effectiveness of its operations worldwide. Shortly thereafter, the Americas became one of the first business units tasked with the major initiative of replacing its local ERP system (Oracle) and integrating the majority of its operations into the worldwide parent ERP system -- the central instance of SAP hosted in Europe.

From an IT perspective, they were immediately faced with myriad challenges. In addition to the tasks related to the overall Oracle ERP replacement and SAP implementation and configuration, the reality is that nearly a dozen local operational systems would remain and require re-integration amongst themselves as well as with SAP. These systems covered critical areas including manufacturing, warehousing, transportation management and distribution. In addition, the local EDI infrastructure needed to be integrated with its newfound European EDI counterpart and the local data warehouse and Business Objects Business Intelligence platform were to be sustained and augmented with data and metrics. Master Data Management and synchronization across the global platform was critical to the project's success.

The Approach:
Chateaux joined the project team with the express goal of helping to assess their inventory of local systems and the functionalities to be moved to SAP, the design and development of the application integration components, custom development of various end-user facing applications and the planning of parallel testing, systems migration and cutover.

The project was organized around the premise of teams based on functional domains, with each team being comprised primarily of key-user resources on the business side and at least one subject matter IT representative. This model proved effective by ensuring that requirements were closely managed by IT, that technological hurdles and potential gaps were identified early and to promote cross-domain information sharing.

After determining the "to be" local systems landscape, Chateaux worked diligently in the production of comprehensive data models and mapping specifications. This provided the framework for the design of a sophisticated architecture of custom integrations and applications to be developed using blend of best-of-breed technologies including Progress, Informatica, MQ Series and EDI. The design of an application integration hub in Oracle provided the data exchange and local storage vehicle.

Effective master data management was achieved through specification of an Operation Data Store (ODS) extract from SAP and the design of data propagation architecture -- one which soon thereafter became the foundation of a GS1/1SYNC data synch initiative for increasing supply chain visibility with suppliers and customers.

The Result:
All objectives of the project were achieved on-time, with minimal cutover down-time and with a tremendously enthusiastic level of success and global recognition.

The key requirement of near real-time operational information flowing through the local application integration hub yielded the most valuable results. The communications with external trading partners which very much depended on this were uninterrupted. Most important from this was the ability to not only preserve but enhance the level of information availability within the local business intelligence platform providing the ability to measure the key indicators of the projects overall value-add and closely monitor the architectures ongoing performance.

The architecture has proven flexible and adaptive long after the initial go-live. In fact, the careful forethought put into its design proved to make it conducive to the consolidation of other local, legacy systems and robust enough to easily adapt to eventual new strategic initiatives -- most notably in the complex Supply Chain domain including migration to SAP's Warehouse Management System (WMS) and a successful cutover to a Third Party Logistics (3PL) distribution model.

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