Finance Evolution at Suntory – how Glisk’s project delivery expertise helped unlock the benefits of S/4 HANA

CLIENT

Suntory Oceania

LOCATION

Australia

INDUSTRY

Food & Beverage

COMPANY SIZE

1500 employees

“Glisk were able to provide us with a highly skilled program managers to support the implementation. Their ability to grasp and continually work towards the big picture whilst being totally across the details at every level was outstanding. They helped us to manage budget and resources across the program, identify and resolve risks early and were involved in every aspect of project delivery.
Beyond their professionalism and expertise, they brought insight into program and project management, PMO management, portfolio management and any number of other areas that have led to improvements to the way we do things. Glisk is a true partner in success, and we look forward to working with them again in the future.”

Mark Palmer

Head of Solutions, People and Finance

Executive Summary

Suntory Oceania – the new multi-beverage business in Australia and New Zealand recently performed a technical upgrade to their SAP instance to S/4 HANA. Whilst the core system had been upgraded, many of the benefits this system could provide the organisation were still waiting to be unlocked.
Over a three-year period Glisk provided Program- and Project-Management expertise to deliver a series of projects as part of the Finance Evolution Program whilst also enabling the IT finance capabilities for the new manufacturing plant in Ipswich, Queensland and adding alcohol products into its sales and distribution channel.

Challenge

As one of the leading beverage providers in the Australia and New Zealand region, Suntory Oceania faced challenges with their current finance systems and processes. Whilst they had upgraded to S/4 HANA, they were locked into cumbersome processes due to the way systems had historically been configured. With a move to a more integrated multi-region business, Suntory Oceania needed to rationalise and deliver benefits within the finance applications.

Approach

Glisk was engaged to structure and deliver a program of work including:

Finance Foundations Foundational work changing the structure within S/4 and related systems. This included:

  • Rationalising the number of Cost Centres and Profit Centres
  • Reviewing the Chart of Accounts
  • Changing the way S4 data was provided to downstream systems (using ACDOCA)
  • Reviewing and improving existing reports and the way many transactions were being processed
  • Automation of bank transfers to all but eliminate any manual processing required
Cost Accounting Introduction of true, granular product costing (forecast and actual) including:

  • Intercompany Costing
  • Granular Costing (SKU/Geography)
  • COGS Splitting
  • Actual Costing
  • Budget Process review
  • Transfer Pricing mechanics
  • Logistics Recoveries
  • Reporting improvements (e.g. zero waste reporting)
Access Control Introduction of an access control solution (GRC) to provide the business with visibility to risk exposure through inappropriate access rights. Roles remediation to address risk exposure.
Purchasing Improvements Various improvements to procurement systems and processes including:

  • Moving to a multi-regional cloud-based spend management system (Coupa)
  • Introduction of an invoice ingestion and automation system (Process Director)
  • Changing Purchase Order release processes to align to changes to the Chart of Authority
Alcohol Enablement Introducing a new line of business, new Finance processes and new systems and interfaces. This included:

  • New Cost Centres, Profit Centres and Chart of Account changes
  • Development of a bespoke system to track alcohol taxes, customs and excise
  • Introduction of transfer price mechanics
  • Review of critical reports to include alcohol or to have alcohol versions of critical reports
  • Ensuring alcohol data fed into downstream systems such as BPC
  • Ensuring forecast and actual costing of all alcohol products was correct
  • Enhancement to monthly cost allocation and distribution routines

Results

With Glisk’s help in delivering this program of work Suntory Oceania were able to:

  • Standardise costing into SAP
  • Improve visibility of costs & self-service reporting
  • Increase P&L accuracy
  • Move to a more efficient, flexible and granular forecasting & reporting suite
  • Improve Compliance & Governance
  • Achieve productivity gains
  • Improve customer experience
  • Reduce roles risk

To talk with Glisk about how we can drive your digital transformation, please reach out here.

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