Beverage group Coca-Cola Amatil is considering turning up the wick on its $65 million business-wide information systems transformation to
steal a march on competitors hit by the current economic slowdown.
CCA chief information officer Barry Simpson said the company had
finished the first part of its three-phase, three-year transformation
project, which is based on systems supplied by German software giant
SAP.
The first phase of the project centred on back-office support.
CCA would move into the second phase in the new year, Mr Simpson said.
However, the company declined to detail plans for this phase of the
operation.
The IT transformation was announced in April 2007 as part of a
five-year strategic review of CCA's operations.
Under the program, a back-office overhaul, dubbed OAisys, is due to be
complete by the end of next year, with upgrades to front-end systems
coming in 2010.
Brewing group Lion Nathan's $8 billion takeover offer for CCA, which
surfaced in November, had not changed the company's IT plans. Senior
management had instructed that operations were to continue on a
"business as usual" basis, Mr Simpson said.
Similarly, CCA's IT budget had not come under pressure as a result of
the slowing economy, he said. "If anything, we are being asked if we
can go faster."
The business had indicated that more funding was available to
accelerate the initiative.
"When business is tough, and the economy is tough, that's when strong
companies get stronger," Mr Simpson told a group of CIO peers at a
roundtable conference held by The Australian Financial Review's MIS
magazine. "That's where the opportunities are.
"This is when you want to be investing in business to drive that
growth and to take advantage of weakened competitors."
Managing IT in tough times did not need a change in strategy, Mr
Simpson said. Measures designed to cut cost - such as the
virtualisation of servers and rationalisation of systems - were very
much day-to-day business for IT operations.
"At the end of the day, you are supposed to be driving efficiency out
of your function, whether the economy is good, bad or ugly," he said.
"That is your job.
"If you are doing projects that don't add any value, you have to ask
yourself why you are doing them," he said.
Tackling the downturn was "more about the big-ticket items that can
take advantage of the situation and making sure you are investing in
your people and your business", Mr Simpson said.
A former global vice-president of IT for Colgate-Palmolive, Mr Simpson
took over the transformation program following the retirement of its
instigator, former CCA chief information officer Peter McNamee, who
departed a year ago.
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