Stretch for Growth

Dave Kelley, Contributing Editor

6/1/2003

The collaborative business climate demands integration of applications and solutions from a number of vendors. Highly flexible and adaptive backbone systems that deliver integration are rapidly becoming the norm for businesses seeking the flexibility needed for future growth. Enterprise integration systems are proving to deliver not just flexibility and adaptability, but are proving to have a viable impact on the bottom line by delivering a positive ROI.

As the world's largest manufacturer of chewing gum and home to some of the best-known brands in the world, including Juicy Fruit, Doublemint, Big Red and Wrigley's Spearmint gum, The Wrigley Company uses the flexibility of SAP's NetWeaver to run both SAP and non-SAP applications. Already using SAP R/3, mySAP Enterprise Portal and mySAP Business Intelligence, Wrigley moved to NetWeaver to integrate those solutions into one platform to lower total cost of ownership.

"The consolidation of the solutions into a single, comprehensive technology platform will make integration much easier," says Nick Moore, director of global program management at Wrigley. "Based on our evolving business demands, we can purchase and deploy the various platform components as needed and be assured of seamless integration."

Case Study

Beringer Blass Wine Estates had a similar need for integration. Selling some 14 million cases of premium wine each year and packaging another 12.5 million cases of branded wine for third-party clients, Beringer Blass operates in more than 67 winemarkets worldwide. To bring its channels together, Beringer Blass chose J.D. Edwards in 1996, since upgrading to J.D. Edwards' OneWorld and now OneWorld Xe, according to John Collins, vice president information technology for Beringer Blass.

"We have employees in the distribution center, the winery production facilities and our corporate offices," says Collins. "We have to tie all of this together so we can see it in its entirety, with data integrity on which to base strategic business decisions."

Beringer Blass currently runs One World Xe financial and HR modules in its facilities in the U.S. and in its offices in London and Melbourne, Australia.

"We needed to be confident we had something that could scale to keep pace with our growth," says Collins, explaining that the entire Beringer management team, including the heads of distribution, finance, manufacturing, IT and other key areas were involved in the success of the implementation.