Twinings selects Rise with SAP to simplify its business brew

Tea company Twinings Ovaltine has chosen SAP’s Rise subscription service to underpin its customer engagement efforts and to make its supply chain more efficient.

The Rise with SAP service packages managed cloud infrastructure and managed services into one contract, and is based on the supplier’s flagship S/4 Hana enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, based on its high-speed database Hana.

Microsoft Azure is providing the cloud infrastructure element of the implementation, which also includes SAP Ariba for procurement. SAP’s Business Technology Platform is in the mix also.

According to an SAP statement, Twinings Ovaltine is modernising its core capabilities from finance to manufacturing to logistics, and it wanted to adopt the Rise approach to get a quick deployment.

The company is one of a parade of customer endorsing the Rise service. It joins, on the roster of public reference customers for SAP, Briggs of Burton, a process engineering company; Inchcape, a London-based automotive sector company; EG Group, a petrol station and food retailer; and Asda.

Twinings Ovaltine has a 300-year heritage in tea making. It has more than 330 varieties and its production facilities manufacture between 45 million and 75 million teabags per week.

The company is looking to take more advantage of automation and to simplify its business processes in the cloud. It also hopes to read the leaves of real-time data and get near real-time sales, inventory and process visibility to become more customer responsive.

“When we started our transformation journey and reflected on what we wanted to do, it was never a technology conversation. It was a conversation about how do we get closer to our customers, understand what they want and how to deliver on that,” said Sandeep Seeripat, global CIO at Twinings Ovaltine.

“We need partners that are matching our business drive, and it’s clear SAP does that. While others can offer the technology, SAP really stood out with its understanding of our business objectives and how it can simultaneously deliver an experience to our customers that goes beyond expectation, whilst setting the platform for our growth agenda,” he added.

Simon Carpenter, who oversees the go-to-market strategy for Rise with SAP in the supplier’s EMEA north region, described the service’s possible appeal to customers in an interview with Computer Weekly in 2021.

“The challenge some of our customers face is getting access to skills not just to run the systems they have today but, more importantly, to start leveraging data capabilities into their businesses. We can help them with that in the sense that we can take on board the technical capacity and they can focus more on business solutions.

“Moving to the cloud requires a new mindset. You accept that there is a best practice, in say procurement. Keep your core as clean and lean as you can, and use the business technology platform, which is also in the cloud, to do integrations, extensions and innovations.”

Michiel Verhoeven, UK & Ireland managing director at SAP, said: “The move to Rise with SAP is a simplification of an engagement Twinings Ovaltine already has with us, as well as establishing a service level that meets the demands of the organisation while delivering an upgrade path that reduces complexity across the business.”