Digital revolution in the alcohol industry: IT & business shoulder to shoulder at CEDC
WEBCON BPS boosted CEDC’s industry leadership making its IT department a full-fledged business partner thanks to rapid application delivery and easy change management.
CEDC took its first steps in creating collaboration tools already in 2013 with the deployment of the Microsoft SharePoint platform as the backbone of the company’s intranet portal. Shortly thereafter, the in-house IT department faced the challenge of creating dedicated applications that could support both internal administrative as well as industry specific processes. The first attempts to create such solutions had proved that the greatest challenge would be to quickly implement changes requested by business.
One of the basic business needs of CEDC was to streamline the process of developing new products, or modifying existing ones. The answer was a multilingual application integrated with existing IT systems (including SAP), able to coordinate the work of multiple departments operating in different locations in Poland and Europe. Their first approach, using conventional tools and custom coding, was quickly abandoned due to the amount and frequency of changes in business requirements.
CEDC’s IT department needed to find an effective way to quickly create tailor-made solutions ready for frequent modifications.
In less than a week, the team at WEBCON delivered a pilot application based on the requirements provided by CEDC.
Thanks to InstantChange™ technology, business changes requested by business users were introduced on-the-fly during the meeting at which the solution was presented. The freedom and speed of change won the hearts of CEDC making WEBCON BPS their platform of choice.
We saw a genuine benefit of using WEBCON BPS already at the first meeting. The solution allows IT people directly responsible for the development of applications to immediately make changes that the users request and to quickly deliver the next stages of the project.
Piotr Majewski, IT Director, CEDC
Solution
Based on the pilot implementation, a system called DROPS was created. It coordinated the processes related to releasing new products including approval, cost estimations, and visual design. A multi-stage acceptance path, compliant with the company’s procedures, made it possible to simplify the decision-making process, and at the same time, to maintain full transparency.
The application was immediately appreciated by its end users, who soon requested its extension to cover production logistics processes. CEDC’s IT department continued these developments on their own.
I can’t imagine managing a complex process such as production in any other way than using an IT solution precisely tailored to the needs of our company.
Marcin Grotowski, Collaboration Software Developer, CEDC
BENEFITS FOR BUSINESS:
- Automation and cutting down on process acceptance times
- Easy access to information, even during substitutions and leaves
- Simplify challenging assignments by automating burdensome, repetitive tasks
BENEFITS FOR IT:
- Ability to work effectively with business in the agile DevOps model
- Speed and low cost of introducing changes to company applications
- A versatile tool to meet the business needs of individual departments
BENEFITS FOR THE MANAGEMENT BOARD:
- Swifter reaction to the rapidly changing business environment Genuine resource savings
- Implementation of best practices in operational and strategic processes
- Operational excellence
After three years, CEDC is now using dozens of applications delivered with the WEBCON BPS platform. The solutions, mostly developed by their in-house IT department, support inventory management, business trip and expense claims, and even quality testing of new alcohols. The system also manages the key data used throughout 44 subsidiaries in the capital group and supports purchasing and decision making processes across the company.
There are several benefits of having all these processes supported by a single platform. For business users, it offers a single, consistent, user-friendly interface. For the IT department, it translates to a converged infrastructure, which simplifies competency management.
| With WEBCON BPS, the IT department is able to develop solutions that support both classic operating processes to become a paperless office, and highly specialized industry processes determining CEDC’s competitive edge. With the freedom to quickly introduce changes, their IT team can respond to business needs faster than ever before. Today, CEDC’s IT department is a full-fledged business partner in achieving strategic company goals. |
The only limitation of this platform is our imagination.
Marcin Grotowski, Collaboration Software Developer, CEDC
About CEDC:
CEDC is one of the global market leaders in the alcohol production and distribution. The company is famous for brands such as Żubrówka, Soplica, Bols Platinum, Absolwent and Żytniówka.
CEDC is also a leading exporter of spirits to 50 countries worldwide and the largest importer of renowned whiskey brands (Grant’s, Glenfiddich, Tullamore Dew, Wild Turkey, The Balvenie), wines (Carlo Rossi, Gancia, Barefoot) and other spirits (Jägermeister, Metaxa, Remy Martin, Cointreau, Aperol, Campari, Cinzano).
Country: Poland
Industry: production and distribution
Software used: SharePoint, SAP
Year of implementation: 2016
Solutions built by CEDC based on WEBCON BPS:
Dozens of applications to support business processes in the areas of marketing, sales, purchasing, finance and HR, spanning across the entire global capital group.
