We implemented a business process management system based on our own NIL BPM platform for Tetra Pak Polska. 

Customer

Tetra Pak operates in more than 165 markets and has over 20,000 employees. After Russia, Poland represented the second largest consumer goods packaging market in Eastern Europe. Tetra Pak is the leading importer in Poland of packaging for liquid food importing mostly from Sweden and the Netherlands. Milk and juice producers represent its main customers.

Problem

The core ERP architecture of SAP R/3 and iSCALA solutions are maintained centrally by Tetra Pak International in Sweden. The sales office receives orders from its customers and logs them into into Epicor's iSCALA solution that is deployed internationally and locally. Each factory responsible for fulfilling the order (spread across Europe and North America) provides 2 weekly reports to the sales team via email:

• inventory list for its clients.
• planned shipments (go directly to customer)

Tetra Pak Poland discovered it faced 2 key problems:

• lack of implementation of codified procedures / processes,
• lack of alert mechanisms for critical processes such as order status events or manufacturing or design delays.

A solution was needed that could manage the common customer service processes and a middleware tool for giving a unified view of an order. IT and sales departments contacted Newitech for its business process management and system integration expertise. The primary goal was to improve customer service and at the same time lower the cost of this service through optimization and automation.

Solution

Newitech began this assignment with Tetra Pak by documenting current processes and systems, conducting multiple workshops and interviews with all personnel bringing together the expertise and perspective of their IT, sales, and customer care departments. Existing systems and applications were also evaluated to create a full picture of how the personnel currently handles the various scenarios of daily operation and to gather information necessary for the feasibility assessment of various solutions.

Once the processes and systems were documented and understood by the Tetra Pak and Newitech teams, the various stake-holders could be brought together to highlight the problem areas and discover the possible optimizations.

One key underlying problem identified was the ability of the staff to get a unified view on the status of an order. Order status information could be found in:

• the core iSCALA system used for sales management,

• a Master Data Management (MDM) and MDO systems with pending and final client designs,

• SAP R/3 made available in PDFs,

• SAP R/3 shipping status and inventory information from emails from the factories provided in HTML

To help solve the problem of creating a unified view of the customer, Newitech provided a platform for integrating the disparate information sources (EAI) and distribution the information as appropriate for example initiating cases for immediate action and issuing simple email alerts. The Newitech engineers implemented key scripts necessary for the  integration requirements, leveraging existing data sources without requiring Tetra Pak International's IT department to initiate costly global changes. Data extraction modules were created for automating the data collection:

• parsing PDF reports from SAP R/3,
• parsing HTML email reports sent weekly from various factories fulfilling orders and holding inventory,
• integrating with web sites as a web service by simulating a web client,
• and direct SQL communications with a locally replicated ERP database.

The tools above served as a foundation for creating a unified customer view. The Newitech team then went a step further by deploying a business process management platform that would automate the key tasks of data extraction as well as manage the work flow implied by specific events. The engineers deployed Newitech's NIL BPM platform and have designed & launched the first few work flows for Tetra Pak. The Tetra Pak team has also received training on the platform and will be able to quickly design & deploy the additional work flows for their teams.

Results

The formal analysis of the processes and problems was an eye-opener for many Tetra Pak team members. The work flows and optimization proposals have served as a road map for various IT and training initiatives. In additional, the cross-departmental, collaborative, consensus-driven approach that was facilitated by Newitech has brought a great sense of buy-in for these initiatives as solutions would be sought as a team.

The analysis has uncovered problems that were easily solved through changes in local business practices and training. It has also revealed minor enhancements to existing reports that should help all of Tetra Pak International's sales offices to more effectively handle the information flow and communicate swiftly and accurately with their customers. And just as importantly, the business process management tool has served as flexible foundational piece of middleware to help coordinate business activities and the flow of information between he local Polish sales office and international manufacturers, corporate headquarters, and customers.

Key Technologies

• Windows Server 2003
• JBoss 4
• SQL Server 2000
• NIL BPM (Micorsoft Windows thick client, J2EE server, SQL Server 2000, Windows Active Directory, Single Sign On mechanism)
• SAP R/3 reports