Quadpack’s latest acquisition of two packaging firms- Louvrette in Germany and East Hill Industries in Dallas- prompted the need to revamp its IT landscape and migrate the long-established SAP Business One ERP on-premise to SAP S/HANA Cloud.
Global manufacturer and provider of hybrid packaging solutions for beauty brands Quadpack embarked on a digital transformation journey to stay abreast of the company’s rapid growth in terms of size and the impending need to unify various IT systems. The modernisation project dubbed Quadpack Connect is centred on migrating its SAP Business One ERP that is on-premise to SAP S/4HANA Cloud as well as adopting other cloud solutions SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.
“The market changes very fast, and we need to change too. We are in a very old version [of SAP Business One], and to move to a current version of that system, the investment in terms of money and time would be the same as moving to a cloud system,” said Jordi Ambros, Quadpack’s Head of Business Intelligence.
Keeping Pace with Company Growth
Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, Quadpack has offices and production facilities in Europe, the US, and the Asia Pacific region and a global strategic network of manufacturing partners. The company has been expanding its global footprint in recent years through acquisitions and partnerships. Just last week, Quadpack has appointed Korean packaging manufacturer LM as ‘Quadpack Official Partner’, a few months after sealing an agreement with Yuga in China in February– further bolstering Quadpack’s presence in the Asian market.
The company’s acquisition of two premier global beauty-packaging suppliers East Hill Industries and Louvrette in 2018 and 2019, respectively, accelerated the need for Quadpack’s ERP system upgrade to ensure that the company’s IT system can manage the changing business requirements and customer specifications.
Migrating SAP Business One On-Premise to Cloud
Initiated in early 2019, the project Quadpack Connect designed in a phased rollout officially began in February 2020. The project aims to harmonise Quadpack, Louvrette, and East Hill Industries’ ERP systems and sets of processes and standardise Quadpack’s manufacturing facilities.
According to Ambros, the company selected SAP S/4HANA Cloud to provide Quadpack the foundation and agility to manage the company’s accelerated growth and rapidly changing business conditions. The intelligent ERP system SAP S/4HANA Cloud has built-in intelligent technologies, including AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. The solution has the capabilities to support new business models, manage business change at speed, orchestrate internal and external resources, and use the predictive power of AI.
The project also focused on finding an analytics system to help Quadpack manage data and enable better data analytics such as migrating historical data and managing clean data from each acquired company’s data management system. The global manufacturer selected SAP Data Warehouse Cloud for data management and SAP Analytics Cloud on the reporting side to replace Microsoft’s SQL Server Integration Services for data warehousing and Microsoft Power BI for data analytics. The new system’s capability to automatically replicate data and synchronize access to data is expected to enhance internal and external customer experiences.
Explaining the objective of consolidating data from different facilities and companies into SAP Data Warehouse, Ambros said:
“We want to harmonise the metadata and our KPIs. Because it’s very important for us that, for example, sales processes will have to be the same sales processes for every company. If a manufacturing facility is specialised in wood and another in plastic, it has to be the same process.”
The SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud implementations are scheduled this summer while the consolidated SAP S/4HANA system will be rolled out to Quadpack’s various locations by the end of 2022.
