The Company
Sunny Delight® Beverages Co. (SDBC), a leading producer of juice-based drinks in North America and Western Europe, produces and markets such brands as SunnyD® Original, SunnyD Intense Sport,™ and SunnyD Baja.™ SDBC was formed from brands acquired from Procter & Gamble in 2004 and is now a portfolio company of Boston-based private equity firm J.W. Childs Associates, L.P. Sunny Delight’s worldwide headquarters are located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and European headquarters are in Barcelona, Spain. “SunnyD,” as it’s known to millions around the world, has more than 500 employees worldwide. The company has research and development centers located in both Cincinnati and Barcelona, and its manufacturing and distribution facilities are located throughout the U.S. and Europe.
The Challenge
When he joined SDBC in May of 2004, Chief Information Officer and Global Controller Greg Winholt was faced with a classic build-or-buy decision, although the circumstances were less than typical. Despite the company just being carved out from Procter & Gamble with an experienced management team and a well-known brand name, it was missing a crucial operational element — an entire information technology infrastructure. Before Winholt arrived at SDBC, J.W. Childs had engaged OneNeck to perform an Information Technology Due Diligence and Strategy Assessment of the company, with a specific focus on the IT requirements to support SDBC once it separated from P&G.
After examining both the business and technology requirements of SDBC going forward, OneNeck concluded that, because P&G ran Sunny Delight on a solution platform that was heavily customized and tightly integrated with the rest of its operations, the new company would have to implement new enterprise-wide operational and business systems. The “impossible dream,” as Winholt calls it, was to have these systems up and running, globally, in a little less than a year.
The OneNeck Solution
After absorbing OneNeck’s assessment, Winholt was convinced that OneNeck was right: the best alternative was to outsource his IT operations, especially with an in-house staff of only two at the time the decision was made. Building an in-house system would be more costly and simply not feasible considering the deadlines and human-resource constraints within which the company had to perform. Given OneNeck’s positive reputation as an IT outsourcing partner and previous experience with J. W. Childs’ companies, Winholt decided to partner with OneNeck. The first order of business for the new IT team was to define the ERP backbone, with mitigation of risk and overall price performance as guidelines.
“As a manufacturing and distribution company, ERP would naturally be at the core of our IT infrastructure, but we had no room for extensive testing and evaluation within our timeframe to go live,” Winholt recalls. “I looked to OneNeck to bring an understanding of our needs and make a selection process recommendation, which resulted in the selection of Microsoft’s Dynamics AX by my core team. I agreed because Dynamics AX fits our level of complexity, it’s cost-effective, and fast to ramp up. These were all key criteria for us.”
In addition to the ERP implementation — which went through intensive prove-out and order-processing tests — SDBC’s contract with OneNeck was for the establishment of a comprehensive technology infrastructure, and the deployment of this infrastructure across seven locations in three countries. OneNeck supplies project management, data center operations, application and database administration, application development and functional support, WAN/LAN support, phone system, e-mail and desktop administration. All of these services are supported by OneNeck’s 24x7 support center.
Applications and services include those that integrate with the core Dynamics AX solution backbone — which handles all aspects of the business including financials, payroll, manufacturing, distribution and advanced planning. Several additional business solutions were leveraged to provide a world class solution platform, including Triplefin for customer order processing and billing; Prescient for production planning and forecasting; RedPrairie to manage inventory; Transplace for shipping order management; and TradeLync from VeriSync Trade Solutions to manage promotions such as vendor rebates.
The Benefits
Because the Sunny Delight global systems were up and running on schedule, the company was able to terminate the transition services agreement (TSA) with P&G ahead of the 12-month hard deadline. Since outsourcing to OneNeck is less costly than the TSA fees, an immediate financial benefit was gained by completing the transition on schedule.
