NESTLÉ GLOBE PROJECT—A SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLE OF GLOBAL ROLLOUT

Source: Ray, Rajesh. Enterprise Resource Planning: Text & Cases. Tata McGraw Hill, 2011

Company Background
Nestlé is the largest food and beverage company in the world with sales of USD $71 billion in 2005. It is the
world’s largest coffee maker (Nescafe) and water bottler (Perrier, Vittel). Its major brands include Nestea,
Nescafe, Maggi, Purina, Kikat etc. It sells and manufactures at over 500 facilities in 70 countries. Its products are
available in nearly every country around the world. With more than 250,000 employees, Nestlé is Switzerland's
largest industrial company, and ranks in the Global 500. The headquarter is in Vevey, Switzerland. Nestlé also
owns Alcon, the U.S. eye-care firm, and 26.3% of L'Oréal, the French cosmetics
group.

Journey with ERP and Enterprise Applications

In year 2001, Nestlé had started its most ambitious ERP and Enterprise implementation programme GLOBE
(Global Business Excellence). This is the largest project Nestlé has ever initiated, and it is the largest ever SAP
implementation project in the world. By the middle of 2006, Globe covered over half of Nestle’s Food and
Beverage Business with overall coverage of 90,000 users, 300 factories and 350 distribution centres. GLOBE
seeks to improve the performance and operational efficiency of its businesses, worldwide. In the process, GLOBE
revisited all aspects of business practices with the goal to run Nestlé's business in different ways for the future.
The objectives of the programme included a fully documented, standardised group-wide business process
architecture and master data with the help of mySAP business suite. The programme was based on a dedicated
methodology called GLOBE Roadmap which is a blend of the SAPs’ ASAP and PwC’s ascendant methodology.

Project’s Mission
GLOBE had the mission to unlock Nestlé's potential by:
1. Leveraging its size as a strength in a rapidly changing environment;
2. Uniting and aligning Nestlé internally to be more globally competitive;
3. Enabling Nestlé to manage complexity with operational efficiency.

Project Objectives
GLOBE had the following objectives:
1. Implementation of harmonised Nestlé Business Excellence Best Practices;
2. Implementation of Data Standards and Data Management—“Managing Data as a Corporate Asset”;
3. Implementation of standardised information systems and technology.

Project Highlights
The programme began with a high-level strategy phase. Then began the development of the GLOBE Template
in February, 2001, with over 200 specialists and managers from 40 Nestlé markets around the world; 150 IBM
consultants from Asia, the Americas and Europe as well as 50 consultants from SAP AG, who worked in Vevey,
Switzerland, in what is now known as the GLOBE Business Technology Center (BTC). Their mission was to map
and translate Nestlé’s needs into detailed processes within the GLOBE Template and thus develop a Nestlé
solution on the SAP platform. This template was then successively implemented in all significant Nestlé markets
supported by regional GLOBE centers in Frankfurt, Sao Paolo/Toronto, and Sydney. Worldwide, the global and
regional GLOBE centres and local GLOBE organisations include 3000+ people.

Project Scope
The scope of GLOBE is across the complete Nestlé organisation including its all organisational entities. It covers
most process areas of Nestlé including:
- Supply (procure-to-pay, materials handling, demand and supply planning, transportation and customer
service)
- Finance and controlling
- Demand (marketing and sales)
- Technical and production (manufacturing, quality, PLM, plant maintenance)
- Human resource including payroll

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GLOBE had multiple SAP modules in scope including the following:
- SAP ERP modules including: Human Resource (HR), Finance (FI), Materials Management (MM), Sales
and Distribution (SD), Warehouse Management (WM), Production Planning – Process Industries (PP-
PI), Quality Management (QM), Project Systems (PS), Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S), Plant
Maintenance (PM), Purchasing, Payroll etc.
- SAP Supply chain management solution known as Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)
- SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) solution
- SAP Business Warehouse
- SAP Enterprise Portal

Implementation Approach
GLOBE is one of the most successful examples of global template building and roll-out approach. The global
template was completed in 2003 and subsequent functional additions are performed as increments to the
template.
- The global template contained data standards, common processes, associated systems settings and
documentation. This also had selected standard interfaces, conversions, reports, project
documentation and training material. The global template is designed and constructed centrally and
contains solution approximately 80% of common Nestlé business requirements. This global template is
continuously enhanced to support continuous improvement.
- Before rolling out of the template to each country, a fit-gap analysis is done against the template
process tree to identify which processes are fits (the country can adopt the template) or which are gaps
(missing functionality in the template, legal and critical business requirements). As each country has
different legal, regulatory, tax and excise requirements and can have a few unique processes, there will
always be some gaps.
- Region-based deployment teams manage deployment to markets/sites using the GLOBE template as a
base.
- Any requirements for new processes are coordinated by the GLOBE template team.
- Approved processes/initiatives are implemented, either globally or regionally, based on instruction
from the GLOBE template team.

The entire project was managed by GLOBE Business Technology Center (known as BTC), which is globally
responsible for business excellence, data standards, change management, the design and maintenance of the
GLOBE template and Global IS/IT. It manages the increments to the GLOBE template and the required
additions/enhancements from the markets, businesses and regions.
There were three Regional Support Centres which are logical extensions of the GLOBE Business Technology
Center and provide support to a set of locations. These centres provided both deployment support and ongoing
application support to ‘live’ sites. They were located in Frankfurt (Europe), Toronto/Sao Paulo (Americas) and
Sydney (Aisa, Oceania, Africa). Various other IT support services is operated on a “Followthe- Sun” approach i.e.
the next centre automatically takes up the support of the application when the office hours of the first site is
over.

Benefits Delivered
Globe enabled Nestlé to become a company that is well integrated globally yet flexible, united and aligned on
the inside and competitive on the outside, presenting one face to the customer. The new framework and process
models allow improved growth in overall sales through more category-focused management, consumer and
customer management applications, improved customer service and improved new product/service innovation
processes and applications allowing better speed to the market. They also present significant reductions in cost
through optimised demand and supply planning, an optimised supply strategy, global purchasing, business
integration, shared services, simplified processes and elimination of duplication. By 2006 when implementation
completed in most of the major markets, it is estimated that the total benefits of the overall programme is in
the region of CHF 3.0 billion p.a.