How can business transformation be driven by a new ERP implementation: the Nice case study

In the last years, Nice has carried out several Mergers and Acquisitions operations. For the most part, acquired companies are still operating with their own industrial methods, tools and operating processes, configuring a situation of overall fragmentation in terms of Application Landscape within the Group, and generating various issues like timeliness and granularity of data availability and difficulties in processes integration across companies. Given such context, Nice Management would like to evolve its current Application Landscape, in order to enable the transformation into an integrated “One Company”, operating on the new Microsoft D365F&SCM as the common ERP platform. Furthermore, with the aim to reduce infrastructural complexity and rationalize related costs, such evolution will include switching from an On-Cloud “private” ERP setup to an On-Cloud totally outsourced ERP. This ERP implementation project starts from the revision, optimization and formalization of the business processes as fundamental requirement to then reproduce them on the Microsoft platform and this thesis will focus on the analyzed processes during the project. Taking into account the context and the needs, with the aim to perform a digital transformation of his business, Nice requested support to Deloitte in order to: • Define a Global Template to be applied to all Group’s countries standardizing the ways of working and adopting processes based on best practices as first step to prepare the ERP implementation. • Upgrade the Group’s Application Landscape to the new Microsoft D365F&SCM release. • Rationalize the overall IT architecture, to reduce the related cost and to improve the efficiency of it. This project is being followed by three Deloitte teams: • A supply chain team, which has in charge the Global Template definition and so the study and revision of all company’s processes. • A Microsoft team for the implementation of the ERP after the definition of formalized processes. This one is the team of which I am part and in the first part of the project will support the supply chain team for the definition of feasible processes for the implementation inside the ERP and in a second moment will actively implement the system for the company. In particular, for the ERP side I will be in charge of the definition of the production processes, from the planning based on forecast to the production lines. • A Finance team that study and revise financial processes. Considering the focus that I had during the project and the objectives defined, the Global Template will be characterized in this thesis with reference to following end to end processes. These processes are part of one of the frameworks, based on best practices, used by Deloitte for the analysis and improvement of the processes of a company: • Forecast to inventory (FTI): is intended the process of forecast and demand management and in particular the main phases considered are statistical forecast generation, sales plan generation, demand plan generation and management of demand signals. For Nice company the two critical processes analyzed were demand planning and replenishment planning. • Plan to schedule (PTS): is intended the process of planning based on forecast and in particular the main phases are supply and capacity planning, production planning, master planning (MPS and MRP) and production scheduling. In Nice case the main processes studied were the production plan definition and the raw material procurement planning, due to the criticality of these processes in their context. • Make to deploy (MTD): we intend the set of process that, starting from the planning and purchasing processes, aim to manage the flow of material throughout the whole production and distribution process to cover the demand of the Customers and/or Subsidiaries. In particular the main processes that has been analyzed are production and logistic.