Oracle Cloud EPM helps Kraft Heinz master big market shifts
The food and beverage giant uses Oracle Cloud EPM to guide faster decision-making to stay on top of a changing market.
“We started with Oracle Cloud EPM Planning in North America with zero-based budgeting and expanded the planning footprint to link our global operations. We wanted to better incorporate financial reports and forecasts, do strategic planning, and implement proper processes. It gave us a better vision as to how we can increase revenue, reduce costs within the plants, look more deeply into our industrial costs, and see where we could make innovations.”
Business challenges
Since the 2015 merger of the Kraft and Heinz businesses, Kraft Heinz has gone on to become one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. The $26 billion-a-year behemoth includes famed household products such as Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Oscar Mayer meats, Maxwell House coffee, and Grey Poupon mustard.
To better understand business performance, the Kraft Heinz finance team needed better and faster insights. It struggled with 10 different, decentralized tools that performed more or less the same tasks. The insights into the effectiveness of the company’s trade promotions and marketing spend would provide visibility into what products they should be selling and which products customers are drawn to. Kraft Heinz looked to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM to gain this strong understanding of how the market was changing and reacting.
Oracle Advanced Customer Services is like part of the Kraft Heinz family.
Why Kraft Heinz Chose Oracle
Oracle Cloud EPM gave the Kraft Heinz finance team swift access to much-needed insights on sales forecasts, actual results, plus the costs of logistics and manufacturing. This crucial information allows the company to understand product-level profitability and cost management in ways it never knew before.
Results
Moving to Oracle Cloud EPM helped the finance team attain a single source of truth. In addition, the team was also able to achieve standardized processes. “It gave us a better vision as to how we can increase revenue, reduce costs within the plants, look more deeply into our industrial costs, and see where we could make innovations,” says Frank Tagoe, Kraft Heinz senior manager of IT finance.
One critical factor in data harmonization was Oracle’s integration with Kraft Heinz’s SAP ERP system. Without that data, there was no single source of truth. Oracle Cloud EPM simplified that work.
An essential element to the Kraft Heinz Oracle Cloud EPM expansion was the designated support team from Oracle Advanced Customer Services, which worked side-by-side with Kraft Heinz throughout the entire process and during the operational phase to ensure success.