January 2009 marked the completion of SAP rollout in Alima Gerber. The system rollout was a consequence of the takeover of Gerber company by the Swiss Nestle Group.

The experts from HICRON Consulting supported the SAP system rollout in the Sales and Distribution area.

"The rollout in Alima-Gerber was a result of the Nestle Group policy which assumes implementation of the SAP system in all of its companies and markets, in conformance with the business principles of Nestle. Such an approach ensures unification of business practices and facilitates monitoring and implementation of changes at the central level", says Roman Kalinowski, LGO Manager, Nestle SA.

The transfer of Nestle SAP system to Alima Gerber was a classical rollout project. Nestle Group, having one of the most comprehensive SAP implementations in the world, has an extremely well-developed SAP template based on the corporate guidelines and broadly documented business processes.

The main task of the consultants from HICRON Consulting was the analysis of the current domestic and export sales processes in Alima Gerber and adapting them to the business processes of Nestle, in conformance with the provided template. The project in the Sales and Distribution area was completed without any modifications in the Nestle template and the business processes of both companies have become practically identical.

An interesting detail is the very peculiar functioning of the SAP system in Nestle. SAP has been implemented in Nestle as a distributed system, i.e. separate SAP systems support the management of master data, sales, warehouse management and finance. As a result, a standard sales process from the purchase order, through goods issue from the warehouse to invoicing runs across a number of systems which communicate with each other via interfaces.