Lion Nathan moves to automated brewing after getting data under control

The brewer has got a robust data-store and much more, after moving to TIBCO’s Collaborative Information Manager from a failing in-house Product Profile Maintenance solution…

Lion Nathan makes and distributes beer and wine, selling its household brand-name products to customers across Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific region.

The heritage company’s origins date back to 1840 and the firm has steadily expanded over time to become one of the region’s largest brewers and winemakers today. The alcoholic beverages it manufactures and distributes are sold under a number of well-known trademarks, including Tooheys, Steinlager, HAHN, XXXX, James Squire, Macs, Speight’s, J. Boag & Son, Petaluma and Wither Hills.

A manufacturing business, Lion Nathan had invested heavily in an in-house product profile maintenance (PPM) application that managed all the details of the company’s finished products and reporting relationships, as well as profile information. The application was used to manage products in 15 different product hierarchies, but technological obsolescence and an inability to easily integrate and expand was hindering efforts to optimise the business. Lion Nathan was finding its efforts to integrate applications such as its customer relationship management system in particular were being hampered by the out-dated system.

The company wanted to introduce a flexible, robust central data-store that could consolidate information about its core products, as well as rebuild and optimise product information workflows. The aim was to simplify new product creation and support improvements in core business functions, such as manufacturing and distribution, as well. The new system also needed to facilitate compliance with major customers’ demands that it adhere to the GS1 global standard for businessto- business data interchange.

Balanced choice
Lion Nathan looked at a number of options but opted for TIBCO Collaborative Information Manager because it offered the right balance of product lifecycle management (PLM) and master data-management capabilities.

“All the tools that we looked at were great for PLM, but they tended to show limitations when you started talking about other master data, such as vendors and customers, multiple inter-related catalogues, complex hierarchies and data integrity across all catalogues,” says David Lucas, IT architecture manager with Lion Nathan.

“We did a comparison and found TIBCO’s product had greater flexibility, configurability and integration capabilities than its competitors in the areas that we consider critical to our enterprise.

“The fact that Collaborative Information Manager is GS1 certified for grocery and liquor operations was also crucial, since it meant we’d be able to meet customers’ requirements for GS1 compliance.”

One source of data
By manufacturing standards, Lion Nathan manages a relatively small number of SKUs – less than 1,000. However, because of the tight regulatory and manufacturing environment in which it operates, Lion Nathan has to maintain accurate, detailed data about every ingredient, process and product it uses.

This includes information on the source of ingredients, nutritional information and lab-testing results, as well as detailed information and images of everything from bottle shapes and designs to the configuration and design of bottle labels.

Governance requirements call for clear records of parameters such as alcohol content – which determines the amount of government tax payable. These parameters must also be linkable to the appropriate labels, so that each of Lion Nathan’s range of products leaves the factory with the right label on it.

Working alongside specialist staff from TIBCO’s professional services group, Lion Nathan’s staff worked to review, clean and load its product and operational data into the master data-store powered by Collaborative Information Manager. TIBCO’s datacleansing and integration consultants also helped the company work through the complexities and challenges of the project.

“It’s a real challenge getting the data quality right,” Lucas explains. “It takes a lot longer than you’d expect, and it’s certainly not as simple as you’d expect. TIBCO supplied experienced consultants from overseas to help train the local consultants, and we had access to the overseas development and support team – effectively giving us 14 hours’ coverage per day, with support from the engineering team when required. The professional services team brought a huge amount of value to the table and they were there for us all the way along.”

A more flexible business
Having a cleaner, better-managed repository for operational information is essential for Lion Nathan’s business as it looks to the future. Compliance with GS1 will allow it to seamlessly exchange electronic product and shipment information with major customers. The single source of product information will also allow IT to better fulfil new business requirements and meet the ever-present demand for business efficiency.

With its data under better control, Lion Nathan’s operations team is now implementing a new workflow that will ease new product development. Marketing staff often want to create state-specific or promotional packaging that is slightly different from existing packaging, but these changes must be tightly managed during approval, and controlled throughout the product lifecycle.

This critical workflow – which relies heavily on integration between a number of legacy systems and Lion Nathan’s enterprise resource planning system – had involved more than 60 steps and 20 different people.

Collaborative Information Manager will eventually reduce the process to approximately a dozen steps.

“Our current workflow process is inflexible, complicated and very hard to change,” Lucas explains.

“Now, we’ll be able to replace it with a simpler process that’s a lot faster, easier to manage and more flexible, so our users can make changes to workflows themselves. They can see it works and what it’s going to do, without having to employ programmers to work on it for months.”

In the longer term, the new system will be critical in supporting a major Lion Nathan initiative: a new brewery in New Zealand that will produce Lion Nathan’s core products using a high level of automation.

The advanced level of manufacturing automation should significantly improve manufacturing efficiency, but to do so careful data management is required to ensure the right ingredients go into the right products at the right time.

“From a data perspective, you have to be 100 percent right,” says Lucas.

“This is one example of how Collaborative Information Manager is helping us: it has provided a data framework that’s stimulating thinking about opportunities we could be taking advantage of. As new opportunities arise, we’ll be able to do things in new ways.

The new system hasn’t been just a step change; it’s a new framework that’s got us thinking about the business and about master data-management in new ways.”


    
   FOR MORE INFORMATION

> TIBCO
www.tibco.com
P: 02 9458 2100


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