Qubix | Case Study - Baxters Food Group

Financial Transformation

Industry

Manufacturing and Food Processing
Employees

1,500
HQ

Fochabers, Scotland
Website

www.baxters.com
Product & Services used

Oracle PBCS, Oracle BI Apps, Qubix Cloudbridge, Cloud Journey Methodology

After acquiring U.S.-based Wornick Foods and plans to reach £500m in annual revenue, Baxters needed to streamline its finance systems landscape with a modern cloud planning solution.

Baxters Food Group is a Scottish food processing company headquartered in Fochabers, Scotland. It produces foods including canned soups, canned meat products, sour pickles, sauces, vinegar, chutneys, anti-pasta, and fruit preserves. Baxters has remained a private family-held company which in recent years has expanded rapidly with its notable acquisition of U.S.-based Wornick Foods.

"Our business has grown phenomenally. Over the last 12 years, we've undertaken 10 acquisitions. As a result of these changes, the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud service is going to be really fundamental in how the finance team can help move the business forward."

Heather Metcalfe
Group Chief Financial Officer

As a growing international business, Baxters Food Group reached out to Qubix to re-energize and simplify its finance systems landscape. The Baxters team had used a combination of legacy on-premises Hyperion systems and complex Excel-based models. Business units in Canada and Australia projected forecasting offline. This process was error-prone, labor-intensive, disconnected, and lacked business insight. Qubix held multiple requirements workshops to identify process gaps and develop a "to-be" finance operating model. Based on this, Qubix created a solution engagement that focused on transforming Baxters management reporting as well as demand forecasting and planning and budgeting processes.

To achieve this, Qubix implemented a cloud-based planning and budgeting and business analytics solution. This included implementing Oracle EPM Cloud Planning and Oracle Business Analytics applications. The solution leveraged prebuilt, best-practice analytics modules, namely Supply Chain, Procurement, and Financials, to empower Baxter's relatively small IT team to provide maximum value to their business. This avoided expensive, ongoing infrastructure and maintenance costs. Data integration between the planning applications, business intelligence applications, and E-business Suite ERP system was achieved with Qubix Cloudbridge - a data orchestration tool.

"Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is the gold standard of cloud-based planning solutions. We wanted a rapidly deployable system to improve our planning systems and forecasting accuracy during a period of ambitious global expansion."

Elaine McKechnie
Head of Group Management Information Systems

As a result of this new solution, Baxters can generate narrative-rich and visual reports for timely decision making. Moreover, data integration between planning, business intelligence, and ERP systems allows the business to plan and forecast against actuals more effectively. As a result of greater analytical capabilities, Baxters can focus on improving business efficiency by reducing stock wastage and cutting overheads.

"From a better forecasting process and better quality of information coming in from our production requirement, I'm going to be targeting the business with a 10 percent reduction in our working capital."

Heather Metcalfe
Group Chief Financial Officer

Qubix approached the project in three sprints. This began in earnest with the implementation of planning applications and business analytics functionalities. The second and third phases focused on delivering specific reporting capabilities captured during the requirements workshops which stipulated the need for commentary capture for Board Reporting Pack and a custom developed Packaging Recovery dashboard. Our Journey to Cloud Methodology was employed to ensure the engagement was successful, on time, and delivered within budget.

Challenges

Manually created, spreadsheet-based reporting which lacked commentary for board-level insight (numbers-only/mechanics as opposed to analysis)
Some forecasts were created by combining excel with other disparate data sources and lacked trend analysis, rolling forecast capability, and historical data
Forecasts are often manually checked to ensure no new SKUs
Labour intensive data collation for supplier management processes (quality, timeliness, and invoice integrity)
Difficulty collating data from the ERP system to create financial reports for key decision-making (4-days effort)
Lack of security and governance between users and roles

Solution

Implementation of Oracle EPM Planning Cloud Service (PBCS) and Oracle Business Analytics applications (Supply Chain Analytics, Procurement and Spend Analytics and Financial Analytics)
Automated data integration between applications and ERP system using Qubix Cloudbridge
Qubix Journey to Cloud Methodology to accelerate delivery to the cloud

Results

Replace disparate spreadsheet-based system with collaborative planning tool within a scalable web interface
Reduce planning cycle times (especially budget) with better integration with sources systems and rapid consolidations
Guided workflows to support bottom-up or top-down agile planning processes
Improved demand forecasting accuracy that reduced stocking and procurement levels
Provided automated reports for KPI, board, and management reporting with commentary to support better decision-making
Increased operational efficiency in supplier management with trend analysis capabilities
Automated Packaging Recovery reports and dashboards
Provided rolling forecast and predictive planning features