Colombina S.A.

To boost its food brands, Colombina aims to empower its field sales teams to help retail clients find the optimal mix of products and best promotions to drive sales—a tough analytics challenge. 

To prepare for transformation, Colombina used IBM Rapid Move for SAP S/4HANA to slash the business downtime required to make the switch to SAP S/4HANA compared to a traditional conversion approach.

Since 1927, Colombina has been the first name in Colombia for delicious candies, chocolates and baked goods. As consumer tastes have evolved, Colombina’s product lines have changed with them—and today, the company manages a large portfolio of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brands.

Consumers in Latin America are increasingly health-conscious, and Colombina recently launched an all-natural brand—named Colombina 100%—to cater to this emerging customer segment. The company saw smaller, independent retail stores as the ideal channel for the new product lines. However, competing for shelf space and customer attention in the crowed FMCG sector posed tough challenges.

While many of Colombina’s target customers shop for groceries at smaller retailers, these stores tend not to have the capability to analyze sales, identify trending products, and maximize sales by ensuring the right quantity of each product is always available on the shelf. If Colombina could enable its field sales teams to provide these capabilities on the retailers’ behalf, it would be a powerful opportunity to boost sales, drive revenues and build its brands.

Like many world-leaders in the FMCG space, Colombina has relied for many years on its SAP ERP solutions to integrate its operations from end to end—from production planning and factory management to the warehousing, logistics and distribution of its finished goods to retailers. As a first step, the company aimed to prepare its business systems for the intense analytics workloads.

Jesus Antonio Brand, CIO at Colombina, takes up the story, “We recognized that performing inventory and logistics planning on behalf of our retail partners was a perfect opportunity to build brand recognition with consumers across the country—especially for our new Colombina 100% products. At the same time, we knew that performing complex analysis at scale would place enormous demands on our existing SAP business systems.”

Colombina was confident that moving to cutting-edge SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA® solutions would create the solid foundation for the next generation of business analytics processes. At the same time, it was vital to make the transition to SAP S/4HANA without any interruption to mission-critical business processes.

“Our company runs on data, and if our SAP solutions were to go offline at the wrong time, our operations would grind to a halt—an unacceptable business risk for Colombina,” explains Jesus Antonio Brand. “To prepare the company for a data-driven future, we looked for a trusted partner that could help us transition to SAP S/4HANA with zero impact on the day-to-day business operations.”

While Colombina’s journey with SAP S/4HANA is just beginning, the company is already measuring significant benefits of moving to the new data platform. 

“Since we worked with IBM Services to move to SAP S/4HANA, we’ve slashed reporting times across the board,” says Jesus Antonio Brand. “In our finance department, we can now produce invoicing reports 97 percent faster. In addition, SAP S/4HANA allows us to create plant planning and management reports 12-times faster, freeing our teams to focus on value-added activities.”

He continues, “Overall, we believe we have reduced the cost of business and operations analysis and reporting by up to 10 percent. Even though we’ve not yet launched our new inventory and logistics planning capabilities, we’ve already measured an eight percent uptick in our revenue—an outstanding start to the project.”

By embracing SAP S/4HANA, Colombina is also gaining the benefit of improved data compression, helping it to optimize its storage costs.

“Enhanced database compression in SAP S/4HANA has shrunk our database from 22 TB to just 5.8 TB,” adds Jesus Antonio Brand. “This capability will be particularly important in the future, because we project our analytics data volumes will grow sharply in the years ahead.”

By partnering with IBM Services, Colombina is on track to capture customer insights that will help grow its brands and accelerate its growth in Colombia’s competitive FMCG space.

“Our work with IBM will empower us to optimize the inventories of hundreds of retail clients, helping both Colombina and its partners to boost sales and grow revenues,” concludes Jesus Antonio Brand. “Data is the key ingredient for success in our industry—and with IBM Services, we’ve found the perfect partner to serve up actionable insights for our business.”

Headquartered in Cali, Colombia, Colombina (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a global food company that aims to delight consumers with innovative, great-tasting products. Managing a large portfolio of fast-moving-consumer-goods brands, Colombina operates across Latin and North America, with manufacturing facilities in Colombia, Guatemala and Spain.