IBM Case Studies Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC taps into new regional markets with IBM and SAP
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Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC taps into new regional markets with IBM and SAP

IBM
Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Food & Beverage
Discrete Manufacturing
Logistics & Transportation
Inventory Management
Manufacturing System Automation
Supply Chain Visibility
Software Design & Engineering Services
System Integration
Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC, a leading brewery in Sri Lanka, was facing challenges with its end-of-life legacy ERP solutions and manual workarounds. These issues were dulling operational insight and efficiency, threatening to hold the company back from meeting its ambitious expansion goals. As operations expanded, existing business systems, some of which were nearing end-of-life, were unable to deliver the deep insight that Lion Brewery demanded, and threatened to hold the company back from meeting its goal of reaching wider regional markets. The company's existing mix of Baan, Oracle, DataStream, legacy and in-house systems were not able to provide the deep operational insight needed to support its ambitious growth objectives. Customization and additional line-of-business solutions had added to a complex and expensive IT landscape, which delivered much less than it promised.
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Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC (LBCL) has been brewing and marketing beer since 1881, and is the market leader in Sri Lanka with a share of over 85 percent. From its head office in Biyagama, Sri Lanka, the company’s 200 employees produce and distribute Lion Lager, Lion Strong and Lion Stout, as well as Carlsberg and Carlsberg Special Brew, brewed under license. The company also distributes premium alcoholic beverages from Diageo, Somersby and Corona. With large populations and growing wealth, nearby countries such as India represent exciting opportunities for growth, and LBCL plans dramatic expansion from Sri Lanka. For LBCL, sales growth relies in part on the ability to satisfy demand, by scaling up production profitably without loss of quality.
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Lion Brewery decided to implement a comprehensive suite of SAP ERP applications, supported by IBM DB2. The new solution was designed and deployed by IBM Global Business Services within an ambitious timescale of less than six months, supporting around 150 users. The core software components include SAP financials and controlling, materials management, warehouse management, sales and distribution, production planning, quality management, plant maintenance and project systems. Additionally, to extract, analyze and understand the data that would be generated by its new SAP ERP applications, LBCL selected SAP BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence. The company worked with IBM to introduce SAP Mobility solutions, which enable users to access interactive dashboards that report on retail sales, costs, volumes, orders and quality in near-real-time, regardless of location. The aim was to standardize and integrate IT systems, applications and data with streamlined processes across all departments and locations.
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The implementation of SAP ERP enables LBCL to benefit from joined-up processes, greater automation and deeper insight across all of its operations.
The combined solution has reduced procure-to-pay cycle time by 20 percent, and cut order-to-cash process time by 40 percent.
For a business where stock control is critical, LBCL has gained deep visibility into every step in the supply chain.
Reduced Procure-to-Pay cycle by 20 percent
Reduced Order-to-Cash cycle by 40 percent
Reduced financial closure duration from six days to one
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