Tiger Brands, a leading Southern African maker and marketer of fast-moving consumer goods, has implemented Oracle E-Business Suite to help streamline its leading businesses and drive international expansion of brands as diverse as baby care products, smoked sausage and skin creams.
Tiger Brands carried out an upgrade to unify the financial, sales, ordering, manufacturing, and procurement processes running its 25 leading businesses and approximately 8 000 products. A leaner, more agile platform now replaces disparate IT systems inherited over three decades of acquisitions.
Oracle E-Business Suite has enabled Tiger Brands, which has more than 15 000 employees and distribution networks in more than 22 African countries, to move ahead with its “One Tiger” project of placing all South African operations on a single platform, in an effort to create momentum for further international growth and help the company achieve its earnings growth targets.
The upgrade has enabled the company to replace infrastructure that had accountants working on five different systems, eliminate redundant accounting sections and save training time as employees only need to know one system. It has also given Tiger Brands better control of business processes, such as the ‘catch weight’ functionality that accounts for weight variance of its meat products throughout their production.
The experienced Tiger Brands IT team together with Accenture, a Diamond level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), quickly carried out the upgrade with minimal business downtime. The company’s financial shared services team experienced immediate benefits as single payments could be made across several business units and single log-ons provided for better efficiency and more accuracy.
“Tiger Brands’ acquisitive expansion over the last 30 years had left the company with widely disparate IT systems in its varied business units across the country.
“Tiger Brands saw the opportunity to materially strengthen financial internal controls through the standardization of processes, to facilitate shared services, to create visibility at all levels across the Group and to extract substantial savings and synergies by bringing all the businesses onto a single Oracle software platform,” says Darryl Thwaits, CIO of Tiger Brands.
“We’ve had a long history and excellent service with Oracle and Oracle E-Business Suite Release was the obvious choice for us.”
“Oracle solutions can drive efficiency and maximise returns by applying uniform processes, increasing visibility throughout a large enterprise and supporting decision-making at both the junior and senior levels,” says Kholiwe Makhohliso, applications sales manager Oracle South Africa. “Tiger Brands was in an excellent position to enjoy the benefits of an upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite.”