Transformative Data Management with Kerry Group
About the Company
The Kerry Group develops, manufactures and delivers innovative taste systems, functional and nutritional ingredients and integrated solutions for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical markets. Kerry supplies over 15,000 products to customers in more than 140 countries worldwide. The company is structured across three business areas, including Ingredients and flavours, consumer foods, and agri-business.
Project Background
Kerry Group embarked on a multi-phase global ERP rollout project, including data migration, called “KerryConnect”. Driven by the need to transform and automate overall data management processes for the benefit of IT and business users alike, the company sought to dramatically reduce the time and money spent identifying and resolving data errors for each workstream, as well as to unify and automate enforcement of its data rules across the organization.
KerryConnect was designed to launch in phases by deploying their template solution to a handful of sites at a time and then scale up accordingly. As the project progressed, the number of sites as well as the data management complexity involved in the migration increased. Kerry Group began to realize that their process for migrating data was no longer scalable and painstakingly manual, requiring it to begin about 9-12 months prior to going live.
Once the process was complete, the information was sent to a data analyst for validation using a homegrown solution built on SAP Data Services. As the project grew, Kerry Group needed to manage a significant volume of data (for instance, 100 individual data objects, which can translate into millions of records at a single point in time). Moreover, the company soon discovered that their validation had to be kept simple due to the many users involved and that the validation function they had created was only working for about 50% of the objects.
Previously, our validation process was manual and very laborious, but with the centralized portal in place, our time is now spent on value-added work as the automation process is seamless and the reports are available on the portal every morning."
Implementation Highlights
Kerry Group connected with Syniti, recognizing similarities between their process and the methodology and solutions proposed by Syniti. However, the Syniti approach was more sophisticated and allowed them to automate many of the pain points they had been experiencing. Once Syniti began supporting Kerry Group’s initiatives, solutions were built around the loading, validation, and reconciliation processes.
“Syniti was able to deliver an automated process to push out to our users,” said Ben Hallinan, Director of Development, Global ICT Application Competence Centre. “Rather than emailing files, they were able to load [them] directly onto a portal, and it automatically checked the structure of the file and made sure it was consistent so there were no issues when we went to validate the file later on,” Hallinan continued. “The bottleneck from the data conversion team was removed, and they had the ability to focus on real, value-added activities. When we went from 20 super users to 200, it made a huge difference.”
The Syniti solution gave Kerry Group a central place to manage their data migration, with a single, consistent reporting process. With the implementation of the solution, the overall speed of running their validation significantly improved. The validation process now runs automatically overnight, so validation reports aremade available at the beginning of each day whereas, previously they had to be manually triggered and then processed, which took all morning to run. The new solution from Syniti allows for more sophisticated data validation checks to be performed.
“Syniti helped us move to the next level with a proven methodology and the solution to back it up,” said Hallinan.
Syniti was able to deliver an automated process to push out to our users...The bottleneck from the data conversion team was removed, and they had the ability to focus on real, value-added activities."
Project Goals
Kerry Group wanted to change their data migration process from mostly manual to completely automated by creating a single solution and interface that allowed for collaboration from all key stakeholders. Kerry Group’s Kerryconnect data migration initiative had three main objectives. They wanted to automate the process to:
- Improve the loading of data for their users
- Facilitate the data validation process
- Quicken the data reconciliation process
Future
Kerry Group’s next step is to scale the migration project again and run releases, which will be based in Malaysia and Ireland. With the new solution from Syniti, they will be able to run their validation overnight in each time zone. When their users come to work, they will have all relevant reports available through their portal, ensuring on time projects and well-managed budgets thanks to the standardization of the processes.
Why Syniti was Selected
Syniti provided Kerry Group with a methodology and solution that improved and automated the data migration business processes, helped bring them back to normal operating standards more quickly, and improved and validated their overall data quality. The Syniti team proved that they had the business knowledge and innovation to ensure a successful migration.
Results
Overall, Kerry Group has realized a substantial cost saving by implementing a standardised process, using a single portal to manage the entire data migration and quality process. Via the central data migration portal, the following processes were achieved:
- Single place for all data migration activities
- Data collection
- Business rules
- Validation and reconciliation reports
- Business rule validation mappings
- Security is now in place for all objects broken out by site and business area.
- Super users are now limited to see data/reports relevant to their specific area
- Generated output files can be published back on the portal no.