Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc. is the No. 1 brand of bottled juice beverages in the United States, with 2005 gross sales of $1.4 billion. Formed in 1930, the cooperative is made up of cranberry growers from Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Quebec and other parts of Canada, as well as grapefruit growers from Florida.
Ocean Spray began facing growing business challenges from more-demanding customers and new competitors. To address these competitive business pressures and preserve its market lead, the company started looking for opportunities to improve performance and make more-informed business decisions.
As part of a multi-year application outsourcing agreement, Ocean Spray hired Accenture to design, build and run an integrated enterprise solution based on an SAP and Manugistics platform that would enable new capabilities and drive new value for the business. Ocean Spray believed that only Accenture, with whom it had successfully teamed on past initiatives, could offer the combination of experience, methods, tools and continuity needed to effectively deliver the results it desired.
Accenture completed the solution program management and implementation in 1999, providing Ocean Spray with the first fully integrated view of its manufacturing process and with advanced data analysis capabilities. Accenture is now working on the outsourcing component, which involves leveraging the skilled resources of Accenture delivery centers in Las Colinas, Texas (near Dallas) and Cincinnati, Ohio, to provide application management and enhancement, troubleshooting and resolution, and user help desk support through 2009.
SAP applications managed by Accenture include:
Members of the Accenture Services team who work on the Ocean Spray project are located at the Accenture delivery centers in Las Colinas and Cincinnati, as well as on-site at Ocean Spray’s headquarters in Lakeville, Massachusetts. Although each location is responsible for different aspects of the project, all of the Accenture team members found that in addition to helping Ocean Spray on its journey to become a high-performing business, they are also learning a great deal, including working as one team.
“Learning the Ocean Spray business was a bit of a challenge,” says Jeff Baert, a supply chain specialist. “Because it is a farming co-op—the largest in the country—the way business is conducted is different than at other companies at which I’ve worked. It forced me to think in a different way in order to accomplish what was necessary.”
Baert oversees the demand planning pieces of the business from Accenture’s Las Colinas delivery center. Using Manugistics software, which aligns with SAP, Jeff and his team help Ocean Spray forecast what to sell, when to sell it and to whom. “In terms of skills sets, I do a lot of UNIX/Korn Shell development and Oracle SQL,” he notes. “Most of what I do is manage the batch cycle that runs every night and make sure there are no issues with the files we have integrated to SAP.”
He continues, “We’re now in the process of bringing in a completely new version of the software to make the process Web-based as opposed to client-server-based, as it is today. The challenge is to seamlessly modify the process that Ocean Spray has been using for the past eight years. What I tell my friends is that as long as you have your cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, I probably did my job right.”
Chris Messinger, manager, also works out of the Las Colinas delivery center. She manages the SAP functional support team, which encompasses people in Finance/Controlling, Sales and Distribution, Electronic Data Interchange and Material Management /Production Planning, and also is the key liaison with her client management counterparts in the Ocean Spray IT department.
Since Messinger primarily works with SAP, she is able to use her background in SAP implementation and business process integration and continues developing those skills. “Even though I’m a manager,” she notes, “I still have hands-on activity in helping support Ocean Spray in terms of configuration and process improvements, which allows me to keep my skill level up.
“In addition, on a day-to-day basis I deal with personnel and planning issues, project prioritization, service request assignments, follow up on various issues and client management,” she says. “What’s particularly interesting about Ocean Spray is that they see us as an extension of their team, so I work closely with my liaisons at the other Accenture locations and the client team to develop the best solutions. It’s a tightly knit group where we’ve all really gotten to know each other.”
Nick Cottone, the lead for the SAP Basis team in Cincinnati, agrees with Messinger. “Even though there are three Accenture groups in addition to the client, we really feel like we’re all on the same team,” he says. “Very often the situation can be pretty demanding; but it’s a great feeling when we work together to resolve issues. The client provides us with great feedback.”
Nick provides technical support for the Ocean Spray infrastructure. For example, if a user calls and cannot access a particular order number, Nick can go into the system and figure out what’s wrong.
“I’ve learned SAP and Oracle and all the ins and outs of being a Basis administrator on-the-job,” he says. With so many people on the team, it’s been very interesting dealing with the different personalities, which has helped me develop my leadership skills. Overall, I have found working on Ocean Spray to be very rewarding.”
Kristy Nevens works on-site at the Ocean Spray headquarters as an SAP master data analyst. “What I do is use SAP all day to do all of the data maintenance for materials,” Nevens says. “We get requests from different departments throughout Ocean Spray to make changes, updates, new entries, etc., to the material master, which is one section of SAP.”
She continues, “I enjoy the fact that I do something different day-to-day. It really depends on what’s needed.” In addition, Nevens says that she has also learned a lot on the job. She had not previously worked with SAP and welcomed the opportunity to do so. Like Jeff Baert, she found learning the business both challenging and rewarding. “Since it’s a different type of business, there was a lot of new terminology that was important to learn. However, learning the language and the business has really helped me become an integral part of the Ocean Spray team.”
Through the comprehensive application and infrastructure outsourcing solution, the Accenture Services team is helping Ocean Spray achieve its goals for enabling continued growth and higher performance. The solution represents the largest consolidation of systems, processes and programs ever undertaken by Ocean Spray, which was achieved within a 15-month time frame. As a result, Ocean Spray is on course to realize significant savings in annual operating expense through the new operating model and enabling infrastructure. The solid delivery by Accenture’s Services team has subsequently been recognized with six outstanding “IT employee of the month” awards in two years.
Reflecting on the project, Robert Carrell, Ocean Spray’s director of information technology, says, “Key to the engagement’s success is a ‘one team’ concept that Accenture helped pioneer, in which Accenture’s Services personnel have essentially become part of our overall IT team. In effect, Accenture project managers and staff resources are used interchangeably with our resources to collaboratively address either SAP-related or non-SAP initiatives.”