At Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan, business expansion fueled data growth, slowing reporting and eating up time for operations teams. To stay ahead in the market, the company needed faster insights.

Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan revitalized its SAP ERP applications by migrating to SAP HANA, powered by IBM Power Systems servers, bringing speed and enhanced analytics to its business reports.

Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan Ltd is a market leader in oral and fabric care products, helping to keep smiles bright and clothes clean. Pakistan’s economy is growing fast, up from around USD 170 billion in 2015 to USD 275 billion in 2018, creating a vibrant, expanding fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market.

To manage its business processes – particularly sales, finance and distribution – Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan runs SAP ERP applications. As the company grew and transaction volumes increased, the time for producing standard reports started to grow, particularly when extracting and analyzing data. The finance team would regularly have to work late to complete the monthly closing, spending around 12-14 hours generating the required reports.

Added to the challenges, many senior managers travel a great deal, and are out of the office visiting key customers and suppliers personally. Remote system logins were often slow and unreliable, restricting the ability to access key data and issue essential approvals.

Ahmed Rehmani, IT Director at Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan, explains: “At a fundamental level we realized we needed to expand our system throughput and capability. We looked for a strategic solution that would fully support our development, with a partner with the knowledge and experience to make that happen.”

With the new SAP ERP applications powered by SAP HANA in place, Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan started to exploit the IBM Power System platform’s capabilities.

Monthly reports that previously took up to 14 hours are now completed in 6 hours, a 60 percent improvement, enabling improved business agility with timely information. Performance improvements mean that reports for five-yearly data that took 20 minutes to produce are now delivered in just 3 minutes. In addition, consolidating the company’s additional business intelligence functions to the IBM Power Systems servers has reduced total data-center physical footprint by 25 percent, helping to cut energy consumption and cost, too.

Ahmed Rehmani and the team are busy rolling out the new capabilities within SAP ERP to managers and sales executives, including new SAP Fiori® applications for remote working. The first application includes the ability to authorize purchase orders securely using a mobile phone – an apparently small change that delivers a major productivity enhancement. Similarly, sales managers can now run reports over longer timespans or in greater detail, analyzing histories and patterns in greater depth to help them identify new opportunities.

Ahmed Rehmani elaborates, “The SAP Fiori apps enables managers to conduct business from their phones and tablets while travelling, bringing convenience and saving valuable time. Before, to approve a new purchase order while travelling, executives had to power up their laptop, log into the VPN client and then sign onto the internal system. Now, they receive email notifications about new purchase orders and they can complete the approval on their phone. This has had a trickle-down effect on the business, streamlining the approvals process so everyone can work more productively. The managing director and senior executives been thrilled with the SAP Fiori functionality, and we plan to roll out Fiori apps to employees in other areas of the company.

“We are already considering adding more modules within SAP, and even moving onto SAP S/4HANA further down the line. IBM Power Systems gives us the ability to add this new workload, and deliver the speed and service that our business requires.”

The last word, though, belongs to personal wellbeing – an area close to Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan’s corporate heart: “Our accountants used to have to stay late after work every month to finish the reports. But with IBM Power Systems and SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA, they can finish up at six and go home to their families.”

Colgate-Palmolive (Pakistan) Limited (the Company) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a public listed company operating since 1977, which has its registered office at Lakson Square, Building No. 2, Sarwar Shaheed Road, Karachi, Pakistan. The Company is mainly engaged in the manufacture and sale of detergents, personal care and other related products. It is a market leader in oral care and fabric care